Creating a WordPress website is a very simple process. If you follow the steps in this article, you can create your own WordPress website in less than 5 minutes.
Before starting the process, you need to figure out certain things like
- A good web host,
- Best hosting plan and
- A distinct domain name.
We will discuss all these things along with creating a WordPress website in this article.
Which Web Host to choose?
There are many options for hosting WordPress websites. But the challenge is to find a Webhost who provides some essentials along with hosting. The essentials are:
Support
It is the most important thing to expect from a hosting provider. Look for a web host who provides 24/7 support for any problems related to your WordPress website. Most hosting providers don’t give you timely support. If your website is down and your hosting provider wouldn’t respond to your support request, you might lose valuable business, customers, and even data.
Up to date
For faster loading and performance of your WordPress site, you need hosting servers which have the latest version of PHP and MySQL. Especially, if you have an ecommerce website, you want a website that loads very quick. If our hosting provider is not up to date with their technology, you are going to lose in terms of speed.
Security
Many hosting providers do not take responsibility for the security of your website. If you get hacked, they won’t help you. A web host ideal should provide security. So it is important to find a secure Web Host before you start your site.
SSL
Your hosting provider should provide free SSL certificate. Otherwise, you pay a good sum for SSL certificate alone.
Plans
You should have options to upgrade from a staring plan, and the upgradable plans should be affordable.
We have observed that hosting provider SiteGround fulfills all the requirements for a WordPress web hosting. Even this website is hosted by SiteGround. So we recommend that you use Siteground for your website.
In this article, we will cover getting a domain, hosting and installing WordPress with Siteground only. However, the basic things are similar with any web host. So you can use the contents of this article with another web host also.
Best hosting plan for your website
When searching online for hosting you might have come across many websites talking about shared hosting, managed hosting, VPS hosting and cloud hosting and some other types of hosting. Though most of this is just wordplay, there are basic things you may need to know.
Shared Hosting
Many websites share a common server. It is very cheap but could cause some problems. Might not work out for you if you run a very high traffic / performance website. Other websites might use platforms other than WordPress and may create issues for your website. If your hosting provider is bad, they might even put lots of websites on a single server.
But for starting your website / Ecommerce business, this is the most affordable option.
Managed Hosting
In this hosting, servers are managed and optimized specially for one platform such as WordPress. So you have better speed and fewer problems. Even here you share a server with other WordPress websites, but their space will be managed from your site so that they do not cause problems or slow down your site.
With respect to Siteground, the shared hosting and basic Managed WordPress hosting are practically the same.
VPS, Cloud & Dedicated servers
These are premium hosting options. They are for websites which handle millions of users every day. As a beginner, you shouldn’t bother about them now. If your user numbers increase, you can move to any of these hosting plans later and so choose a hosting provider with whom you can shift to other plans in the future.
Woocommerce Hosting
If you are new to WordPress and want to start an ecommerce website, you might have come across Woocommerce Hosting plans. These hosting plans are made to get maximum out of people who are new to WordPress, and they are nothing special.
If you want to start a WordPress Ecommerce website with Woocommerce, go for the regular Managed WordPress hosting itself. It’s more than enough to start your ecommerce website.
Buying Hosting for your Website
SiteGround gives entry-level Managed WordPress hosting at an affordable price. Their basic Startup plan is $3.95 per month for one website and 10,000 visitors per month. This plan is enough for many beginners. Believe me getting monthly traffic of 10,000 visitors is an achievement for a beginner.
If you are going to have multiple websites or you get more than 10,000 visitors per month, you can choose other plans for $5.95 or $11.95 per month. For a growing business, you can start small at $3.95 and upgrade to others plans as well.
There are other Fully Managed WordPress hosting providers such as Kinsta. They offer higher quality hosting, but they are expensive for a beginner. If you have a big budget or planning on immediate revenues, you can go for them. Otherwise, you can even change the hosting later, when you have made a good income.
Getting a Domain
Go to Siteground website and click “Get Started” with the plan of your choice. The next page will be “choose domain” page. Pick a domain name of your choice and enter in this page. It will tell what domain names and domain is available.
Picking your Domain name
Be careful in choosing a domain name. If your domain name contains a trademarked term, you might get into to an intellectual property issue.
For example: WordPress is a trademark and so you cannot use a domain name like helpiewordpress.com.
Your domain name is your identity. Make an extended Google search and find a unique domain name that is searchable by people looking for you. Especially for a business or ecommerce website, the domain name should be your brand name.
Choosing a Domain
You could see there are lots of domain choices from popular domains such as ‘.com,’ ‘.net’ and country domains such as ‘.us’, ‘.uk’. There are also other generic domains such as ‘.tel’, ‘.me’. Pick a domain of your choice.
Based on your location you might want to have a ‘.uk’ or ‘.us’ domains, but we suggest that you use a ‘.com’ site. It will be convenient in many ways.
After fixing your domain will be “yourdomainname.com” Then click “Proceed” to go to the next page. In the next page fill all you login, personal and payment details.
In the Purchase information column, choose which data center you want to create your website. It is good to pick a data center that is closest to your place, but it really doesn’t matter nowadays.
Choose a period of time like 12 months or 24 months and then proceed to checkout your account. When the purchase is successful, you will receive a notification and an email giving you the login details of your account on SiteGround. Log in to your account.
Installing WordPress in your WordPress
After logging on to SiteGround website., go to “My Accounts” in the menu. In the “My accounts” click “ Access cPanel” button. You will be taken to the cPanel of your account. This is where you have full control over your website.
Here you can either click WordPress in Auto install option so that it directly installs WordPress in your website with default settings or you can manually change settings and install WordPress.
To change settings before installation, go the “WordPress tools” in the cPanel and click the WordPress Installer icon. In the next page, you can change the settings. We suggest that you change the Admin username and Admin password such that your account is secure. You can change other settings such as email-id and other things.
After fixing the settings, you can click the “Install” button, and it starts to install WordPress on your website. And you are done!
You have successfully created a WordPress website by getting a domain, hosting and installing WordPress.
Click the given link which is given as https://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ to go to your website. Fill out your login details and go to your website.
Now we have successfully installed WordPress on your domain. Read this article to Create an ecommerce store using WordPress.
Installing SSL certificate
We already mentioned that a good hosting provider should give a free SSL certificate. SSL certificate is seen as a green colour lock near the web address of a website in a browser.
If you don’t have an SSL certificate when your customer/users visit your website, their browser is going to say that your website is not secure. Especially when you have an Ecommerce or business website, an SSL certificate is very important.
If you have followed the steps mentioned above and created a WordPress website then in the cPanel of your SiteGround account, you can find ‘Let’s Encrypt’ icon under the “Security” option. Click ‘Let’s Encrypt’ and go to the next page. Choose “Let’s Encrypt SSL” and click install. SSL certificate will be installed to your website and you will get a notification.
There is an “HTTPS Enforce” option,you can click it on. It will push people to your secure ‘https’ website even when they go to ‘http’ website.
Great! Now your website has an SSL certificate.
You just created a WordPress website on your own. You have done a good job. This is just the first part. There’s still more to go. You have a lot of designing work to do inorder to create a fully functional business website. To know more, subscribe to our newsletter and follow our Helpie blog.
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very helpful article. thank you