Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

Steps to Create a WordPress Website

How To Create WordPress Website Tutorial

Everybody around you is creating a website but you don’t know how to make one. How sad is that!

But not an issue anymore, you have come to the right place. In this post, we will discuss how to create a website using Wordpress.

WordPress is the easiest and most user-friendly website platform which provides a powerful interface for creating full-fledged modern dynamic websites.

Moreover, it is the best and for sure the most popular CMS platform used by about 36% of all websites online.

Well, let’s get straight to the major question of how to create a WordPress website now.

Now, let’s start the simple steps in detail:

Step 1: Get a Domain Name

First and foremost, you must get a Domain name for your website. Domain name is the online identity of your business, i.e. name of your website in the simple terms. In other words, it is your website address or the URL which users type on the web browser’s address bar to visit your website.

Choosing a domain name is a thoughtful task. Below are some of the things you must consider while creating/choosing a domain name:

Keep it simple and short: Create a domain name that is simple, short and easy to read, remember. It enhances the chance of users typing your website address correctly on the browser.

Suitable for your website content: Make sure that your domain name is relevant to the content you are going to put on the website. Besides, you can also include keywords on the domain name if it sounds good.

Choose an appropriate domain extension: Domain extension is the suffix such as .com, .net, .org, .edu etc. which is added at the end of web addresses. They have specific meaning such as .com for Commercial, .org for Organizations, and .net for Network. These three extensions are the most used extensions which you can use as per the nature of your site, however, .com is always preferred.

How to get a domain name?

There are several domain name providers online from where you can buy a domain name. Most of the domain name providers have a domain name search tool where you can type the name you want and it checks the availability of the domain name.

Below are the top domain Registrars you can check out:

1. GoDaddy: GoDaddy is probably the biggest registrar company which offers domain names at a low price. You can buy .com domains from GoDaddy for $12/year while domain names with other extensions are available at a cheaper price less than a dollar.

2. NameCheap: As the name suggests, NameCheap is where you can purchase domain names at a cheap price. It provides domain names of your choice at the low cost, starting from $1 to $69 per year.

Step 2: Get WordPress Hosting

Next, you have to find out the best WordPress Hosting service which suits your needs. There are several web hosting companies offering different types of WordPress hosting plans. Below are the types of WordPress hosting plans you should know about:

Shared Hosting: Cheapest hosting plan. With shared hosting, multiple websites share the same IP address and resources of the server including the memory, hard disk space, and the bandwidth. (Pros: Budget-friendly plan. Cons: Limited space, compromised speed and security).

VPS (Virtual Priavate Server): With VPS plan, you will be provided a certain portion of server resources. You will share server with other VPS users but there’ll limited users, not as many as in shared plan. (Pros: Secure, Option to get more server resources anytime as your business grows. Cons: Expensive for the small businesses and beginners.).

Dedicated Hosting: very expensive plan. All the server resources are dedicated to a single user. (Pros: Full storage, bandwidth, and full control over the server resources, more secure. Cons: Not a cost-effective plan for small companies.).

Managed WordPress Hosting: Managed WordPress hosting is hosting cum WordPress management solution which provides some of the essential WordPress tools. It is a kind of dedicated hosting specific to WordPress platform. (Pros: WordPress-centered hosting. Cons: Quite expensive for the small and growing businesses.

How to choose the best hosting for WordPress?

First of all, keep your mind clear on the type of website you are going to create. Will it be a personal portfolio, blog, business or online store? This helps you to assume the website space, memory, and other server resources you may need. So, basically, the logic is ‘Choose the hosting plan that best meets your needs.’

Below are some of the best WordPress hosting Providers worth checking out:

1. Bluehost:

Bluehost is a WordPress hosting company officially recommended by WordPress.org. WordPress and Bluehost have been consistently working together since 2005 aiming at creating an ideal hosting for WordPress platform. Bluehost comes first if you are looking for high-quality cheap WordPress hosting solutions.

Major features:

  • 1-Click WordPress Installation
  • True scalability – single click upgrade to VPS or dedicated server
  • Enhanced cPanel
  • Standard performance
  • Free SSL certificate included

Bluehost Pricing:

Basic Plan: $2.95/mo., 1 Website, 50GB Space, 25 Subdomains

Plus Plan: $5.45/mo., Unlimited websites, Unmetered Space, Unlimited Subdomains

Choice Plus Plan: $5.45/mo., Unlimited websites, Unmetered Space, Unlimited Subdomains.

2. SiteGround:

SiteGround is a trusted, secure, and one of the most popular WordPress hosting companies available. It ensures blazing website speed, tough security, and awesome customer support.

Major features:

  • In-Built 1-Click WordPress Installer
  • FREE SSL via Let’s Encrypt.
  • Auto-updates: Always latest version of WordPress.
  • SuperCacher for super-fast website.

SiteGround Pricing:

StartUp Plan: $3.95/mo., 1 Website, 10GB Space, 10,000 visits/mo.

GrowBigPlan: $5.95/mo., Unlimited websites, 20GB Space, 25,000 visits/mo.

GoGeek: $11.95/mo., Unlimited websites, 40GB Space, 100,000 visits/mo.

Step 3: Installing WordPress

Next step is to install the WordPress software on your hosting server.

Installing WordPress is a vital step which used to require a careful attention and some technical knowledge on the user’s part.

Almost all the renowned WordPress hosting companies offer 1-click WordPress installation so that you can get the latest version of WordPress installed in a matter of minutes.

In case, the web hosting you are using does not provide a one-click WordPress Installer, you must install the software manually using FTP or any other service recommended.

Step 4: WordPress Dashboard

WordPress Dashboard is the backend of your WordPress website from where you can access your site’s content and customize the website. You will see the WordPress dashboard after you login to your WordPress website with the user details that you set during the WordPress setup.

WP Dashboard is simple and user-friendly which highlights the useful options. The image below is the screenshot of how your WordPress dashboard looks at the beginning.

Now, let’s have a quick look at the major parts of WordPress dashboard.

Home: Home is where you are now. It is the default page for the WordPress dashboard.

Updates: WordPress has frequent updates in the core software along with the themes and plugins. You can check the available updates and operate if available.

Posts: You can add general posts or blog articles from here. Most of the content on your WordPress website are posts. Additionally, add post tags and categories from there.

Pages: You can add pages like ‘Home’, ‘Contact Us’, ‘About’ etc. from there.

Comments: All the comments from the site users will be available here.

Appearance: Appearance in the WordPress dashboard is the vital menu. You can make complete control the design of the website via this menu. It includes themes, Customize, widgets, menus, header and CSS editor.

Plugins: Plugins are the handy tools for adding functionality. You can see the installed plugins and also add new plugins via this menu.

Users: WordPress supports multiple users. You can manage all the website users from this menu.

Tools: By default, it has ‘import’ and ‘export’ tool in this menu.

Settings: Another very important section in the WordPress dashboard is ‘Settings’. You can see all the site configuration options here as general settings, writing, reading, discussion, media, and permalinks.

Step 5: WordPress SEO

WordPress platform is the most SEO friendly platform that has a fine-tuned SEO-optimized structure. Therefore ‘Search Engine Optimization’ is an advantage if you choose WordPress as your website platform.

The most noteworthy, WordPress platform has an ability to manage on-page SEO so well that helps your website rank better on search engine result pages. You can optimize the permalinks, title tags and headings, images and other media easily. To optimize the permalinks: Go to Settings > Permalinks > Set Post name.

In addition, WordPress is a completely responsive and mobile friendly platform. Responsiveness is one of the must-have features in every WordPress theme, also included in the WordPress.org theme standard guidelines. Google and other search engines love mobile-optimized websites.

Next, site speed is one of the most important ranking factors. A website with enhanced website speed is automatically SEO optimized as search engines love speedy websites. To make your WordPress website fast, there are various types of speed optimization plugins like caching plugins. You can use plugins like WP Super Cache and Autoptimize to improve WordPress speed.

As started as a blogging platform, WordPress offers a great interface for building a successful online blog and business. If you can create a quality content, WordPress is fairly an awesome thing to start with.

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

That’s not all. There are several WordPress SEO plugins which help you to improve your WordPress SEO in a great deal. Below are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins:

1. Yoast SEO

With over one million active installs, Yoast SEO plugin happens to be the most popular and highly-rated plugin. It is a leading plugin in the present market for a reason: it is often updated to keep up with the cutting-edge SEO trends and techniques. The plugin has a powerful option to achieve every sort of technical optimization. It provides handy options for dealing with page titles, descriptions, and URLs which plays an important role in delivering effective SEO.

Features:

  • XML sitemaps
  • Internal linking suggestions
  • Keyword optimization
  • Better content
  • Page Analysis.

2. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is an all-in-one SEO pack best known for its versatility and data flexibility. The major highlight of this plugin is its ability to import and export data from other sources including third-party SEO plugins. Its feature that offers plenty of customization option with easy-to-use settings also makes this plugin noticeable.

Features:

  • Meta description editor
  • Open graph integrator
  • Link mask generator
  • Meta robot tags editor
  • Plugin setting manager.

Step 6: Website Analytics

Last but not the least, website analytics is a very important task for a website owner. After putting so much of effort on creating a website, you also need to know how your website is performing. Website analytics provides you the idea of the website traffic, website content, website conversion and more.

So, how to get WordPress website analytics?

First of all, you can use the WordPress plugin Jetpack.

It provides you complete website analytics including daily traffic, website views, visitors, likes, and comments.

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s all about creating a WordPress website.

I have tried to put together all the steps in a simple manner so as to create a guide to WordPress for beginners.

Now, it’s all up to you. Let me know if it is useful to you.



This post first appeared on AfroNaija.Com, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

Steps to Create a WordPress Website

×

Subscribe to Afronaija.com

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×