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The rules for riding are either confusing, hard to find or missing completely. Ride is no longer a skill; it's a feat. Which makes it possible for you to Command an animal without Handling it, but that's basically it. You can make the animal walk or gallop or whatever, but I can't find anything useful about what that means.
And Command an Animal is probably a Nature skill thing, for which Fighters and Paladins are not known. Which seems odd. If you want to ride a horse, I suggest you be a druid or ranger.
And commanding the animal uses as many actions as the animal uses to do what it's doing (how many is that?) so you can't do much else while riding. And what happens if you fail? Where are the rules for dismounting? (is that Acrobatics now?)
Help? What's going on?
Command an animal is a general skill check(Nature). Which Fighters and Paladins are free to put skill ranks in.
Gallop is on page 286 under Horse
2 Actions
You Stride twice and are accelerated 10 during these Strides.
If you have the Ride Feat
So to tell your mount to Gallop you would take a Command An Animal Action telling your Horse to Gallop(2 actions). Letting you move (40+10)+(40+10) or 100 feet, you then have 1 action left.
From what I can tell, the Command An Animal action uses 1 action for the standard Leap, Seek, Stand, Stride, Strike. But if you use a special move for that animal(like Gallop) it takes as many actions as that activity says.
Most animals know the Leap, Seek, Stand, Stride, and Strike basic actions.
So you could also use Command An Animal to Stride(1 Action) and then you make an attack (Strike Action), and then have 1 action left for whatever you want.
If you don't have Ride you have to make a Handle Animal check before doing Command an Animal so Ride saves you an action.
...so some parts of Ride are buried in the Animal Companions rules. Which is not the first place I'd look, especially if I don't have an animal companion, just a horse I bought from the horse shop. And this doesn't explain anything else about riding. All it does is to say whether you've told the horse to do what you want, and not what happens if you fail.
On p283 it talks about animal companions have the Minion trait. This lets the command give the companion 2 actions instead of the usual effect. I infer that that means you can (for example) make it gallop with one command. Which is good. But (p76) says that a minion has only two actions per turn. So an animal companion horse is strictly slower than a normal horse which can gallop-move (140 feet) rather than just gallop.
This is presumably not what was intended.
And while anyone can become competent on a horse, as all skills get +level, only rangers and druids can be Masters at it. So maybe the paladin's warhorse is no longer an important thing. Not even a Cavalier can be a Master on his horse.
On the plus(?) side it's wisdom-based, so heavy armour doesn't hinder your riding skill.
On the whole, I'm happy with Ride being a feat, and it gives a sensible benefit, but the rest of the rules don't really hold up. At the very least, it needs an example, something like Vlorax's explanation above.
Actually, the Bestiary (yet another place to look) gives a clue. The Buck action for the horse. I infer that if the rider fails his Nature roll when giving a command, the horse will Buck and the rider falls off. Unless he domesticated or trained it himself, that is.
So let's look at the numbers. A 5th level fighter, Trained in Nature and Acrobatics, with the Ride feat, Wis 12 and Dex 16, wearing a Breastplate (ACP-4) and with a shield (ACP-1) is riding a normal Horse. He's trotting along the road. Clippety-clop.
Bonus to Command the horse is +6 against a DC of...of...of what? It's not in the skill description, under Animal Companions or under Horse in the bestiary. No idea. Moving on, let's imagine DC10 because it's just a bog standard horse. In the absence of Take 10, he'll fail 3 times out of 20.
So on those occasions he fails, he needs to make a DC16 Acrobatics check to stay aboard, with a bonus of +5+3-4-1 = +3. This is not looking good. He needs a 13. So he'll fail that 7/20. So his estimated time in the saddle before the horse puts him in the ditch is...2 minutes. This is not in combat, just walking. And with what may be an optimistic DC for commanding Dobbin.
And a 1st level character trained in neither Nature nor Acrobatics had better not go near a horse at all.