WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world powers almost one-third of the websites and blogs. Setting up a website may not be always easy for newbies but with the availability of CMS like WordPress, everyone now can create a beautiful website in hours.
In this article, we have tried our best to bring something valuable and easy to follow guide on How to make a website on WordPress.
Lets Dive into the details:
Continue and follow the steps below and within no time you will come up with an attractive WordPress site. Now let’s walk through the different steps one by one:
- Getting a perfect domain name
- finding a hosting service provider
- Installing WordPress
- Choosing a WordPress theme
- creating content
- customizing the new site
- installing the plugins
- updating the site
1.Getting a perfect domain name
The first thing in creating a website is to get a good domain name that fits your brand, business or niche. A domain is an address on the web that people use to find you or your business.
For example, www.ikreatethemes.com is our domain name. This represents our web address.
Purchasing a domain name is quite simple. Simply visit one of the domain name registrars like whois.com, Godaddy.com, etc and search for your domain name.
A domain name that is close to the name of your business or your brand is considered as a good choice. Make it short and simple. long names are hard to remember.
.com is the most popular domain name extension and is recommended for most of the business( until you would want a country-specific domain).
If you fail to find a preferred .com domain name, you would want to consider other options like:
- .net – better for technical sites and tech companies, but is available for all
- .org – better for a national and international organization and social or public sectors but is available for all.
- .co – better for the startup agencies, but available for all
If your business or website targets only the national level audience, it is better to have a domain extension for your specific country like .co.uk or .in.
The domain costs more or less $10 per year and is renewed annually at the equivalent price.
Tips: use this link to compare and find the best deal for domain https://www.domcomp.com/
2.Finding a hosting service provider
Now once you are done with the web address for your website, you need to find a space to put on your website. This kind of webspace is commonly called a web host.
Without having a webspace you cannot host your web site and cannot turn it online.
While choosing a web hosting service provider you need to consider few important things and see if it meets the following criteria:
- PHP version equivalent to or greater than 7.2
- MySQL version equivalent to or greater than 5.6
- supports HTTPS
Expert Advice: Our hosting expert recommends Site ground hosting as the best hosting provider.
Whichever hosting service you go for, you have to decide to pick one of the types of service they offer, either a ” shared hosting” or a “managed hosting”
When you choose shared hosting, you will be sharing a server and the resources along with the server with another website that is being hosted on that server.
For example, you will be sharing the bandwidth, storage space, etc. This kind of shared hosting is costs less and is a better fit for the smaller sites.
If you have a larger or a complex website and need to use more resources, than going for a managed WordPress hosting would be a better choice. This would cost you a bit more than the shared hosting but has many more benefits.
let’s have a quick look at the signup process for a hosting provider. Here we have used Siteground hosting as an example, but the process is almost similar for all the hosting providers.
Pick a hosting plan
Go to SiteGround page and select one of the plans that suit your needs.
Fast & Secure Web Hosting
FOR SUCCESSFUL PERSONAL AND BUSINESS WEBSITES
Managed WordPress Hosting
POWERFUL, YET SIMPLE TO USE
3.Installing WordPress
By now you will have the admin under your control. Now is the time to begin with the real bits and pieces. Here now we install WordPress.
You can install WordPress directly from the dashboard of the hosting panel or manually depending upon your hosting provider.
One-click WordPress installation
Most of the web hosting service provider offers one-click installation for WordPress which makes it very easy to download and set up WordPress. site ground offers a one-click WordPress installation.
check this article “how to install WordPress” for the complete installation process. most of the hosting providers have their cPanel dashboard build on industry-standard, so you should not have difficulty in installing WordPress even with other hosting providers.
Manual WordPress installation
The manual installation of WordPress is not that elementary process. The manual installation process includes downloading of WordPress file to your computer and later uploading it into your hosting provider.
If you using site ground hosting, you can easily download and install WordPress using the one-click installation.
4.Choosing a WordPress theme
A WordPress theme is a pre-made layout for your website. It is like a pre-built website that you can overrun using your content and modify as per your requirements and likings.
To install the free themes offered by the WordPress community, follow the following simple steps.
- Go To your WordPress dashboard.
- Click on appearance >>themes on the left sidebar in the dashboard
- Click add new button
- Select a WordPress theme of your choice. you can type a keyword like “blog theme” in the search box on the top right corner to search for more themes.
- after you choose a theme, click install
- after the installation is finished click on “activate“
If you want to add some more functionality and features in your theme you can buy a premium third party WordPress theme from the theme market like Template Monster and Theme Forest. Here is a quick step to install a premium third party theme.
- Purchase your theme. Download the file in the Zip format.
- Sign in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to appearance >> themes.
- Click the button to add new.
- Click on the button that says “upload theme”
- Select the recently download zip format theme file
- Download the .zip file of your new theme.
- Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Click on Appearance >> Themes. This will take you through to the theme dashboard.
- Click the button above the themes that say ‘Add New’. This will take you to the WordPress theme dashboard.
- After the theme is installed successfully you will see a message of completion. Now activate the theme and you are ready to go.
5. Creating Content
By now you have installed a WordPress theme and you are ready to move on to the content part. Adding content in WordPress is pretty simple. The WordPress content is divided into to category. Pages and Post. Here we discuss each of them in detail.
1. Pages
The pages in your site are mainly static parts. You need to edit the content of the page to make any changes to them.
For example, your “contact us “ page is a static page on most of the websites.
to create a new page go the “pages” and add “new”
2. Posts
A post is something that makes the blog section of your site. The news updates or any informational updates on a recent topic or any other subject matters come under blog content.
Post forms a reverse chronological order. The post can be tagged, can contain a specific category and also can be archived.
6.Customizing the new site
After you finish adding some content in the form of pages and post you will start to feel the essence of your site. Now is the time to take a step and start making custom changes.
You can always customize a WordPress site to make it fit your brand and your content need. With time, you will figure out a lot of ways to customize your site, but here we will be looking over a few key processes.
1. Change the Site Title and Tagline
When you first create your site setup, your WordPress site title is automatically set to ‘Just another WordPress site’. Here you can change this rudish statement for the title to the one you like.
- Log in to the WordPress dashboard
- click >> setting >> general
- Find “site title ” and add your title in this place
- In the “tagline” section, add something explanatory about your site.
- Click “save”
2. Add a navigational menu
Creating a navigation section is a bit important and needs to be handled carefully. Navigation helps your audience to find out your best content more easily. The WordPress theme comes with one or more menu options.
Follow these steps to create a navigational menu:
- Log in the WordPress Dashboard
- go to >> appearance >>menus
- Give a name to your menu in the “menu name“. Select the page you would like to add your menu too from the drop-down list.
- Some themes have multiple menu options and you can see different checkbox options in the “menu setting“. choose a “primary” for now. you can make a change to your menu later if you do not like the primary menu setting.
- Click the” save menu” to make your menu live.
3. Set a homepage
For the home page, you will have two options to go with: A static home page content layout or a dynamic blog post page layout.
The dynamic page keeps on updating with each new post added while the static page remains unaltered with the same content all the time ( until you make custom edit to the page content statically).
For both the way:
- Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Go to >>setting>>reading
- Go to ‘Front Page Displays’.
- select “your latest post” or ” a static page”
- Click ” save changes”
If you choose to select your latest post on the home page, you can also choose the number of posts that you would want to display on the front page.
Also, you can define if you would want the full-text display or just a summary of the text.
4. Change Comments Setting
The built-in feature in WordPress already has a comment function and is set to “on” automatically by enabling the comment on your site you can create a better way to get more engagement.
However, it is better to customize the comment feature so that you can effectively filter out the unauthorized comments and spams.
To create a filter setting in the comment feature simply follow these steps:
- Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Go to >> setting >> discussion
- Now, select the option “comment must be manually approved “. (this will help you to filter out low quality and spammy comments and approve the valuable comments only.
- Hit “save changes“.
7. Installing the Plugins
Plugins are something that will make your life way easier. By installing the third party plugin you will get access to amazing features that are not there in WordPress by default.
Most of the plugins are free in the WordPress plugin repository and third-party plugins are available in premium for extend functionalities. Plugins provide almost all the features you could need at any instance.
But using too many plugins might make your website slow or may create conflict between the similar type of plugins and hurt your site. so you need to be specific in selecting the best and suitable plugin based on your requirement.
Some of the recommended plugin in WordPress includes:
WordPress SEO by Yoast: A plugin that will help you optimize your site and help you rank better in google.
Rank math SEO: A optimization plugin for better SEO
Contact for 7: a plugin for building contact forms
WooCommerce: a popular eCommerce plugin
WP Rocket: a plugin for optimizing the speed performance of the site
Google-Analytics: a plugin for analysing different search metrics.
Never pick a random plugin. Look at the reviews, support, update, and total installs before you select a plugin. A bad plugin will do more harm than helping you.
Here are short quick steps to install the plugin on your site:
- Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Go to “plugins” click on “add new”
- from the search bar on the top right find the plugin you want to download
- once you find an appropriate plugin click “install”
- once your installation is complete, you will be prompted to click ” activate plugin”
- Now, move to the setting area of the plugin to configure it. The process of configuring a plugin is different for each plugin.
You can also download and install premium plugins straightway from the third party platform. For example, you download and install a very handy premium plugin called WP Rocket for making your WordPress site load super faster.
To use this kind of third party plugin you need to download the zip file and then upload it to the WordPress like shown in the image above.
8.Update the site
And, with this we come to the final step in creating a WordPress website.
You might have come up with the best website out with great content, but do not care much about updating your site regularly, then your all effort might go in vain. You need to keep your themes and plugins well updated to keep your site safe from spammers and hackers.
Note: use a security plugin to keep your site protected from hackers and spammers. Click here to find list of WordPress Security Plugins
Every time there is an update with the theme and plugins, make sure to allow the update to take place with your site as well.
To check for updates:
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to update options
- Find the updates under different topics for plugins and themes.
You can make the update one by one simultaneously or set to make them all update at once.
Final Takeaway:
By now you should be able to create a beautiful and a functional website on your own. This step-wise guide should give you all the ideas you need to come up with a new blog. If you run into any kind of issue and want us to help you with creating your dream blog, please do not forget to write it on the comment below. We would be happy to help you with the best.