I can totally give you a crash course in how I do it but have a look at this first: https://www.couchcms.com/
Now let me preface this by saying I’ve never used Couch before (I am very tempted to download it and give it a try though), but I think it might be exactly what you’re looking for in terms of simply setting up editable sections without getting too complex about it.
Apparently Couch totes that you can set it up on an already static built site with no php knowledge required (which you would need a bit of php familiarity with using WP). Also it’s open source and free–there is a premium version though that allows you to remove the CouchCMS logo and link from the backend admin panel. Like in case you want to rebrand the CMS as your own. But honestly I don’t think you care about having their logo there. And as far as I can tell it won’t be on the frontend of the website anywhere.
You’re still going to have to set up a MySQL database to run it however…but you’d have to do that with WP too anyway.
Give Couch a look over and if you still want to go with WP we can talk about loops 
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