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How To Set Up A WordPress Website Or Blog?

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Do you want to set up a WordPress Website or blog which will be useful and successful? We know starting something which may be foreign can be daunting and quite stressful. Stay tuned; luckily, we discuss the simplest & most effective way to start up a WordPress blog or website in this article.

Requirements

Now to begin, ask yourself what do you need to start a website or blog.
A blog or website of any nature, let alone WordPress, requires the following three items which serve as barebones to the process:

  • A domain name: Feel free to explore and research domain name ideas as your WordPress website or blog will need one, and it will be the one representing your brand.
  • A Web Hosting Account: This will serve as the server your website will runoff. Every WordPress website requires one; otherwise, it will not function. Think of it as a computer that runs 24/7 just for your website to be public.
  • Time: You will need about 30 minutes to an hour to create a WordPress website or blog from scratch. If you need more functionality, plugins, or style, please spend more time making your website unique and your own.

Now that we know exactly what we need, let’s begin the process of starting a WordPress website or blog the most straightforward way.

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Web Hosting

The first step of any website or blog creation is to pick a web hosting service for your website to be hosted on. Because this is for a WordPress website, some hosting services like BlueHost & HostGator provide extra benefits for WordPress websites that serve as plugins. This can be extremely valuable, especially if you don’t know much about website development.

Once you have done this, install WordPress and configure the plugins of the hosting services you have selected. Luckily, BlueHost & HostGator provide a simple one-click option to install WordPress into their servers, making it extremely easy & efficient. If you wanna see some of the best WordPress hosting services check out our article on that.

Configuring WordPress

Once WordPress is installed, head over to the WordPress files online & log onto your account.
Once you have logged onto WordPress, enter the Site Title, Tagline & the domain you have purchased into the settings option.
From here, go into Reading Settings and select which page you would want the homepage to be. Then, at the very bottom, tick the box for the indexing of this page option. This step will set your homepage and will let the search engines know to select keywords off this particular page for ranking purposes.

Now to configure any discussion board pages, head over in settings to the discussion subheading. Select the option for linking notifications from other blogs on new articles and allow people to post comments on brand new posts. Next, go to the very bottom of that same page, and select “comment author must have a previous comment option.”

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Now that the discussion is completed head over to the permalinks subheading and select the URL option, here you can set what URL you want a visitor to see on particular pages. Once that is done, we can now assign users.

Head over to the users heading on the settings menu & fill in your website’s profile details.

Next is the fun bit, we can now select the WordPress theme you are most fond of to start the blog or website.
Browse through free & paid themes, both first & third party and select one.
Once that is completed, we go into one of the other crucial sections, which are plugins. These will help elevate your experience, gain knowledge & provide advantages with ready to use applications.

Plugins

Regarding the plugins section of this tutorial, you technically don’t need to use them because WordPress is quite optimized; however, adding a few to make it easier for you wouldn’t hurt either.
These plugin applications can be anything from Site Builders, SEO Optimizers, Spam controllers, Firewalls, General Site Maintenance & Optimizers to Form Builders.
If you are interested in knowing some of the best plugins to optimize and rank your site, check these articles we wrote on that

The Best WordPress Plugins To Optimize Your Website

The ultimate list of SEO plugins for WordPress

Starting The Blog Process

Once you have decided whether you want to have or not plugins, the final moments arise.
We must delete the sample WordPress Blog post of the website. To go to this, click the Pages menu item on the blog and hit the trash button to delete the sample post. For now, to keep it as simple as possible, you do not need to create a contact us or an about us page.

The final moment has come, and it’s why you began this journey, writing your first entry for your blog. Navigate to Posts > add new via the sidebar of WordPress.
You will be presented with three entry points, first is the Title. Make sure to make this as catchy and engaging as possible; the second is the content to be written and the third is for any tags or images & categories. Once you have filled these out, click publish and away it goes.

In the future, adding more features can make the blog a lot more engaging, however, for simplicity’s sake, this is where we finish. Plugins & extensive themes will make all the difference once you master the art of creating a blog or website with WordPress!

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Wrap Up

As daunting as it may seem to start a blog or website with WordPress, it’s quite the opposite in reality. If you are of any technical background, this tutorial will serve as the most basic start-up of any blogging style on WordPress.

Big Kitty Labs is one of the leading software development companies in Columbus Ohio that has been developing applications, websites, and software for over 10 years. Contact us for free discovery and consultation on your next project!