To create a WordPress website, here's the whole process step by step: Infotalks
If you want to create a WordPress website, here's the whole process step by step:
- Sign up for web hosting (we recommend Bluehost).
- Choose a domain name for your website.
- Install the free WordPress software.
- Choose a WordPress theme.
- Create your first site.
- Install a few important plugins.
- Don't forget about marketing.
If you want to sign up for a web hosting account, you should use one of the Bluehost links on this page.
If you go through these links, you'll get two benefits:
(1) they're affiliate links, which means we'll get a small commission if you buy through them,
(2) you'll get a discount of $2.75 or $3.95 with a free domain for you.
You'll not get this discount if you visit Bluehost website in any other way.
How to create a WordPress website - a bird's eye view
Okay, here's the plan for the next steps we're going to take.
The important thing is that you can do everything yourself (if that's a word) and that we keep the costs as low as possible:
Why you should choose WordPress as the platform for your website
How to choose a name for your website, buy a domain and hosting
Familiarize yourself with the WordPress user interface
Choose a theme / design for your website
Acquire plugins to extend the capabilities of your website
Create basic pages
Consider starting a blog
Customize the navigation of your website
In short, by the end of this guide, you'll have a functional, beautiful website that won't put you in debt.
Speaking of money, we won't focus so much on how to make money from your website in this guide. But we've other resources for that. Check them out:
Step 1: Choose WordPress as the platform for your website
To be honest, there are many website platforms you can use when building a new website - content management systems (CMS) is what they're usually called.
The idea of a CMS is to give you some easy-to-use tools that allow you to edit the content of your website without any programming knowledge. From a user's perspective, these CMSs look mostly similar to the familiar user interfaces on Facebook or Google Docs. Basically, you create new pages or documents and publish them on the Internet.
But enough of the technical details! As I said, there are many CMSs - more than 100, as Wikipedia lists.
Fortunately, though, it's easy to choose the best one. There's only one king on the top of the mountain - and that's WordPress.
WordPress is used on more than 43% of all websites (according to data). Once again, that's all websites!
Or to put it another way, about every third website you visit was built with WordPress.
Here are the key details of why building a website with WordPress is the right choice:
it's open source, it's free, it's the ultimate DIY solution for building websites and online stores, it's especially versatile - it can power any type of website, it's fast, optimized and secure, it's SEO-ready, it facilitates social media promotion
One important difference: the "WordPress" we're talking about here's "WordPress, the software" You can find it if you go to WordPress.org.
There's also the other variant of WordPress - "WordPress, the commercial service" which you can find at WordPress.com. We describe the differences between the two variants here. For now, though, remember that what we want is found on WordPress.org, which is a more versatile and cost-effective version of the platform. All this will become clear in the next steps.
Action Notice. At this point, there's no task that you need to do. Step 1 is just about getting familiar with the tool you'll use in the next steps to create your WordPress website.
Step 2: Choose a name for your website, buy a domain and hosting
When you're learning how to create a website, choosing a name is probably the most entertaining aspect of the whole process.
After all, you've complete freedom here. You can literally choose any name you want for your website.
But There are still some things you need to understand so that you can be successful later.
First of all, there are almost 2 billion (!) websites on the Internet (at the time of writing). This means that staying original can be quite difficult.
It's a really good idea to design your website name (and therefore your domain name) either after the name of your business (this is the most obvious approach) or after a phrase associated with the niche you're in, but with some additional words for better brandability.
In short, a good domain name should go like this:brandable - unique sounding, like nothing else on the market, easy to remember short - these are also easier to remember easy to type and hard to confuse - you don't want people wondering how to spell your website name including niche related keywords - for example, if you do anything with pizza, it would be cool to have "pizza" somewhere in the website name; this works in other industries too
Step 3: Familiarize yourself with the WordPress user interface
You can log into your WordPress user panel by going to www.YOURDOMAIN.com/wp-admin/
WordPress login
Use the credentials you set up at Bluehost in the previous step (screenshot "WordPress installation" above).
After you've successfully logged in, you'll see the WordPress interface in all its glory:
WordPress Dashboard
(1) Welcome Message - Some of the most important areas of the admin panel are listed as DeepL access links - these are usually your DeepL accesses to create a website.
(2) The current status of your website and what's happening with it.
(3) Posts - this is where you can create blog posts.
(4) Media - here you can upload/manage images and other media files.
(5) Pages - here you can create sub-pages.
(6) Comments - here you can moderate comments.
(7) Appearance - change the design of your website here and/or adjust how certain things are displayed in the current design.
(8) Plugins - install new plugins here.
(9) Users - manage the user accounts that have access to the website admin panel.
(10) Settings - the most important settings.
At this stage, it's good to take care of some basic WordPress settings to get started, which will help you further on.
a) Set permalinks
Permalinks define how the individual web page addresses - also called URLs - are structured within your website.
The most optimal structure is when the title of the page is included in the URL. For example, your "About" page (more on that later) should be found at a simple address like YOURSITE.com/about. If you set the permalinks correctly, you can achieve this.
To set your permalinks, go to Settings → Permalinks in the main sidebar of your WP dashboard.
From there, select this setting:
post name b) Make your website public
I assume you want Google to be able to find and index your website. To ensure that, go to Settings → Read and make sure the "Keep search engines away ..." box is unchecked.
visibility c) Set the title and tagline of your website
Go to Settings → General and set the Website Title and Tagline fields as you wish.
Your website title and tagline can appear in different places on the website. Some WordPress themes display them on the home page and in the SEO description - which Google uses when your website is listed on results pages.
The tagline is optional - you can leave it blank if you don't have one for your website. However, it's always part of the web design process, so it's good if you bring a suitable tagline.
d) Allow or disable comments
Whether you want to allow comments on your website or not is up to you.
On the one hand, allowing readers to leave their opinions and questions under your articles/pages can be very helpful in building a community around your website. On the other hand, you'll have your hands full fighting spam and making sure there's no trolling. Sometimes it's better to use the contact page as the primary communication channel.
You can specify whether you want to allow or disable comments under Settings → Discussion.
comments e) Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
I don't know why this setting still exists in WordPress at all. It's mainly a holdover from the days when pingbacks and trackbacks were one thing.
However, if you want to learn how to build a website these days, you can easily disable them by unchecking the following setting in Settings → Discussion.
pingbacks f) Set your time zone
Setting your time zone correctly will make publishing new pages and posts more predictable.
As a general rule, you should either set the time zone to be where you're, or to be where your target audience is. Whichever makes more sense.
You can set the time zone in Settings → General.
Now that we've the basic settings, we can move on to the interesting stuff:
Step 4: Choose a theme / design for your website
The great thing about WordPress is that it works with interchangeable themes - called themes.
This means you can change the look of your WordPress website with just one click.
For example, this is what a WordPress website looks like by default, right after installation:
WordPress default
Step 5: Get plugins to extend the capabilities of your website
Plugins are to your WordPress website what apps are to your iPhone
In other words, they extend the standard functionality of your website by adding some much-needed features. If you figure out how to build a website on your own, plugins can help you take advantage of some great features without having any programming knowledge.
Here are the plugins you should get - and the best part is that they're all free:
Yoast SEO - helps you with search engine optimization and makes your website more accessible to search engines in general.
Google Analytics for WordPress - integrates your website with the most popular solution for analyzing traffic on the Internet.
Wordfence Security - improves the security of your WordPress website.
UpdraftPlus - makes automatic backups of your website.
Optimole - optimizes your images.
WPForms - allows you to add interactive contact forms to your website, through which your visitors can reach you directly - much better than displaying your email in plain text on your website.
Also, check out this list of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. You might find something interesting there as well.Installing plugins is easy. If it's a free plugin, all you need is the name of the plugin.
Go to your WordPress dashboard and then to Plugins → Add New. There, type the name of the plugin you want in the search box and then click "Install" and "Activate"
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to install WordPress plugins.
Step 6: Create basic pages
There are some pages that all websites should have, regardless of their purpose or goal.But first, how to create a page in the first place:
To do this, simply go to your WordPress dashboard and then Pages → Add New. You'll see this screen:
Add WordPress Page
(1) A place for the headline of the page.
(2) The body - the main content of the page. The interface is very similar to MS Word. You get all the basic text formatting features (like bold, italic, align text left/right/center, create lists, etc).
(3) You can add images by clicking this button.
(4) Switch between the text editor and the image editor. Use the former only if you're at least somewhat familiar with HTML code.
(5) The Publish area. This is where the main Publish button is located.
(6) Discussion. Decide whether you want to allow comments or not. You cannot enable the "trackbacks and pingbacks" setting.
(7) Highlighted image. Most WordPress themes take the featured image and display it in a prominent place next to your page.
When you've finished editing the content of the page, click "Publish"
Now that the instructions are out of the way, here are the pages you should create:
About - I've mentioned this page a few times now because it's really important. The About page is where you tell what your website is and why visitors should pay attention to it. This page is basically a must for anyone who wants to learn how to build a website.
Contact Us - here you can display some contact information along with a nice contact form that people can use to reach you directly (you can get such a form via the aforementioned WPForms plugin).
Privacy - this page has become an extremely important element in today's web. Learn more about privacy pages in WordPress here.
Portfolio - a place where you can showcase your previous work.
Store - an important element if you want to sell something on your e-commerce website. For this to work, you'll also need a popular WooCommerce plugin - the best e-commerce solution for WordPress.FAQs - if the scope of your new website requires some additional information for potential users.When you're done with that, you can also check out this list of some valuable pages worth featuring on your site. Consider it a beginner's guide to the must-have website elements.
Step 7: Consider setting up a blog
A blog (as well as marketing through content - also known as "content marketing" in general) is one of the most effective ways to promote not only your website, but also the products you want to sell through it.
And it's not just me saying that. There's clear data to prove that blogs are a great tool for online marketing: 55% of marketers say that blogging is their top inbound marketing priority.
Running a blog is a simple concept. You regularly publish articles related to the topic of your website.
Technically, blogging tools are built into WordPress from the beginning. In fact, WordPress started as a blogging platform.
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