In this online world, you may need to build a website for your business, product, or portfolio. When you realize that you need a website, then, many things come to your mind. What will your site look like? How will it work? Or how much will it cost to develop? And obviously the maintenance cost. Here is a complete solution for all of your problems.

Making a website is not difficult where many content management services are available. You really don’t require hiring a developer for an entry-level website. 

Checklist

Let’s have a look at what you need before starting.

• Domain Name
• Hosting
• WordPress CMS
• Time and Patience

Why WordPress?

There are many content management systems available now. But WordPress is the easiest and convenient one. This is designed for everyone, where coding knowledge is not a must. 

The installation process of WordPress is not a difficult task. It can be installed within the blink of an eye following a few stapes. It is the most important reason for choosing WordPress.

Moreover, WordPress has a broad theme and plugin library from where you can easily pick anything for your website. Community developers of this open-source platform are sharing their ideas, codes, and experiences that give access to reach at the apex of popularity.

Statistics say that ‘WordPress is used by 63.4% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 37.0% of all websites.’

Why do people love WordPress?

WordPress is a straightforward and flexible content management system. You can easily create Posts and Pages, insert media, into your content. And, just with a click of a button, your content will be live on this online world.

WordPress supports multiple user management. Not everyone does not need the same access to manage the website. In WordPress, Administrator manages the website, Editor deals with content, Authors, and Contributors write content.

Also, WordPress has a strong media management capability. It allows uploading any media quickly. Drag and drop uploading makes the process more convenient and straightforward.

Step 1: Pick a domain name

Picking a domain name is the first thing to do. Go here and check the availability of your domain. Then register and follow other guidelines.

Step 2: Buy a hosting plan.

The domain name will give you an identity. And then you need to purchase a hosting plan to host your website. Here we have different hosting plans. Go and pick the right one according to your needs.

Step 3: Installing WordPress

Once you have brought a domain and hosting, you are ready to install WordPress. There are two most useful ways to install WordPress. 

1. Download WordPress from the official website and upload it to your hosting.
2. Use our software installer from cPanel. We provide a fast software installer to save your time and effort.

For installing WordPress from our installer, first, log in to the cPanel with username and password, which we have already provided. Go to the Site Software menu which is in the Software section and click on WordPress. You will find WordPress in the blog category.

From our cPanel, we automatically generated your credentials when you click on install, which is not available anywhere else.

In many other cases, you need to choose a protocol. ‘http’ is the standard and default protocol, but if you have an SSL certificate, select https. Then select the domain name and directory where you want to install WordPress.

Site Setting:

Here you will find the place to put your site title in. Also, you are required to give a short description of your website, which will be used as a tagline of your website. Don’t be afraid; this not nothing permanent. You can change it at any time from your WordPress dashboard.

Most importantly, you need to create an admin account. Give a username and password, which will be used for further site maintenance. We advise not to use ‘admin’ or ‘administrator’ as your username. These are the most common, and these create a chance of guessing passwords easily.

Provide an email address against your username and password. You will get notification of any update in this email address. Also, this will be needed to recover the forgotten password.

Choose Language

English is the default language of WordPress. But this is not limited to English only; WordPress has a long list of supported languages. Choose yours.

Plugin and Theme Selection

Our software installer recommends two plugins to install at the same time as installing WordPress. Limit Login Attempts plugin makes your website secure from unwanted false login attempts. And Contact Form plugin helps to build your contact page.

For theme selection, you don’t need to pick any theme from here. Just leave the section as it is. We will work on it later.

Advanced Options

There are few advanced installing options like choosing database name, table prefix, and backup location. You don’t need to think about it. Our installer will take care of it. However, if you want to set any specific name of your database, this option will allow you to do so.

If you have done all the previously mentioned things correctly, now click on the ‘Install’ button. This will check your submitted data and start installing it. Once done, your website is live. Now you are free to customize it according to your preferences. 

Furthermore, if you don’t want your website to be open to audiences during the development period, you can do this by adding any ‘under construction’ plugin.

Step 4: WordPress Customization

So the first thing, login to your WordPress dashboard. You will find your login page here- http://yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php. It will redirect you to the wp-admin directory if you make a successful login attempt. Here is your dashboard.

Know the options

Let’s focus on the available dashboard options. Here is a shortlist of options-

1. Dashboard Home
2. Posts
3. Media
4. Pages
5. Comments
6. Appearance
7. Plugins
8. Users 
9. Tools
10. Settings

1. Dashboard Home

This page immediately appears after login. You will find a welcome message with a few interactions. Also, you can see the total number of posts, pages, and comments here at the ‘At a Glance’ menu. You can save any quick draft from this page.

2. Posts

From the ‘Posts’ menu, you can create, edit, schedule, or modify any post. To add any new post, click on ‘Add New’ from the menu, and an editor panel will appear to write a new post with the application of featured images and other options. In this same menu here also have ‘Categories’ and ‘Tags’ submenu to arrange your posts easily.

3. Media

This is the default media library of WordPress, and it’s one of the most influential media managers. From here, you can upload different types of media (image, video, pdf, etc.). Also, you can find any previous media file by media type and uploading date.

4. Pages

Pages are essential for your website. You may need a custom homepage, contact page, or privacy page for your website. This option allows creating or editing pages. You can easily create it from here. To create a new page, click on ‘Add New’ and start designing a page. There also have many page building plugins for creating page templates.

5. Comments

This option gives you the opportunity of hearing from readers. If you allow visitors to leave any comment for you, here, you can manage those comments. You are allowed to approve or unapprove any comment. Also, you can edit or delete unnecessary comments from your website.

6. Appearance

This is the most important option for defining the outer appearance of your website. Here you will find six submenus-

1. Theme
2. Customize
3. Widgets
4. Menus
5. Background
6. Theme Editor

You can pick any theme from the Theme submenu, and there is a vast library of WordPress themes. Also, this option will allow uploading any customized theme for your website. We can install, activate, or deactivate any theme from here. Also, there is a live preview option that allows seeing the demo before installing.

Customize submenu allows you to customize your website identity, colors, background images, menus, and other things. You can edit your site title and tagline from here.

Widgets allow adding different options to your website header, footer, or sidebar area. WordPress has a long list of default widgets, and also you can develop any custom widget if you want.

From the Menus option, you will get the advantage of creating a header menu, footer menu, or any custom menu according to your preference. You can put any page, post, or category to the menu. Also, you are allowed to drag a component to any suitable position on the menu.

Moreover, the Background option allows setting any background image of the website, and the Theme Editor option will enable us to edit theme coding from the WordPress dashboard.

These six options are associated with the theme. Different themes will give you a different experience, but more or less, the basics are the same.

7. Plugins

Plugins are considered as applications that extend the default functionality. You can install, activate, or deactivate any plugin from this menu. Here go some essential types of plugins that you need-

1. Anti-Spam- Akismet Anti-Spam plugin is a default plugin that helps to protect your website from spam. There also are few other plugins in this category.
2. Analytics- You will need the analytical plugin to calculate your website growth and see daily visitors. You can use ‘Google Analytics for WordPress’, or ‘Jetpack’ for it.
3. Security- Security plugins will check your security issues and suggest you taking action. ‘Wordfence Security’ is one of the popular security plugins.
4. Contact Form- This type of plugins allows creating a custom contact form for your website. ‘Contact Form 7’ is a popular contact form plugin.

8. Users

Users’ menu allows adding new users with a specific role. Five types of roles are available here. 

1. Administrator
2. Editor
3. Author
4. Contributor
5. Subscriber

9. Tools

Tools menu offers some important tools like export, import, site health, and others. 

10. Settings

A considerable number of setting options are available here. Starting from General, Reading, Writing this menu allows configuring your website correctly. Let’s have a look at some important options-

1. New User Role- If your website allows user registration, what will be the role of new users? You can define it from this option. This belongs to the General submenu.
2. Time Zone- You may need a standard time zone or your time zone to set on your website for a better and easy understanding of time. In the General submenu, you will find this. You will also find the time and date format under the time zone option in the General submenu.
3. Homepage Display– What you want to display on your homepage? You can display blog posts or any static page. This should be defined from the Reading Setting submenu under the Setting menu.
4. Permalink- it allows creating a custom URL structure for your permalinks. 

How to create a blog post?

From the ‘Posts’ menu, click the ‘Add New’ submenu first. A new page will appear. Here you will find options like title, body, images, and others. Start filling those accordingly. Enter your post title in the upper field, and enter your post body content in the main post editing box below it.

Select a category, add tags, add featured images and make other selections from the right sidebar. Once done properly, click ‘Publish’ and your post will be published immediately.