Create your WordPress Site with this Step-by-Step Approach
Have you ever wanted to dive in and build your own WordPress website? But felt overwhelmed by the whole process?
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the steps to building your own WordPress site from scratch. If you’re looking for help designing your website get in touch here.
Step 1: Choose your Hosting
The first step in building your website will be to select and purchase your website hosting. This is where your website will live on the internet. You want to select a hosting that works well with or specializes in WordPress.
Here are some of the top recommended hosting for WordPress:
Step 2: Purchase a Domain
You’ll want to purchase your domain in your selected hosting. Choose a domain that’s short and easy to say/read. “.com” terminations are the most common and the best for you to create a website that’s easy to find.
Your audience will type this to reach your website and the link you’ll share it with everyone!
Step 3: Install WordPress on your hosting
Depending on your hosting you might already have a WordPress installation, if not follow your hosting instructions to install WordPress. Make sure to select a secure username and password.
This will be your access to your site so save it in your preferred password manager. Once the installation is complete log in to your website to start building your website.
Step 4: Add foundational Plugins
Before we start building and designing your website we want to get your basic tools added to your website. In this blog, I talk about the 5 must-have plugins for your website. Your first step will be to install these plugins!
Install and setup the following plugins on your website:
Step 5: Install your Builder
It’s almost time to start building your website! Install your chosen builder and accompanying theme. Take a look at my top recommendations for builders here. I highly recommend using Beaver Builder.
Whichever builder you choose the most important thing is that you use a builder that you’re comfortable with. Using a builder will help you create custom designs for your site instead of relying on a pre-built theme.
Step 6: Style the Customiser
Once your builder is installed and the corresponding theme then it’s time to style your site’s general settings. This will define the available design for your website across the board, helping you stay consistent with fonts and colours across the board.
Visit your site while logged in and click the customize link at the top black bar. Go through all the sections and add your branding and your personal settings.
Step 7: Add your website Pages
There are many ways to go about building your website, I like to start by creating blank placeholders for all of the pages on the site. This will make it easier for you to link to the different pages as you’re building your website.
Create the different pages that your website will need. You can leave them blank or add the content you have for them. Once you have all of your pages created you can start designing them.
Step 8: Start building your pages
It’s time to have some fun! Let’s start building out your pages. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all that you have to do but start with one page and go from there.
Once you’ve built your first page you can save some of the modules you think you’ll reuse to make building the next page easier.
Before moving on to the next page, make sure to look at how your page will look on phones and tablets.
Step 9: Test your site
Once all your pages are built it’s time to test your website. You’ll want to test:
- Make sure all links are working and going to the correct places.
- Test your website on your phone and make sure it’s easy to navigate on your phone.
Step 10: Update WordPress
Developing & building a new site can take time so now that it’s ready it’s time to update the website!
Head over to the dashboard and click updates. Run all the updates for your website and confirm your website is looking good once you’re done.
Step 11: Optimise your SEO
Your website is built and looking good it’s time to start telling the world for each page select and add a keyword to Rank Math and follow the prompts to optimize your posts for search engines.
Step 13: Run speed Test
Finally, test your website speed and make the necessary improvements so that your website loads faster! This will improve your client’s experience and your search engine results.
Those are the top steps to building your website! If you follow these steps you’ll be able to build your new website from scratch!
Looking for more support? I’m building a course to help you build your WordPress website from scratch. I’ll walk you through the above steps in detail and include tips on how to design your pages, choose your hosting and so much more!
If you’d like to be the first to know when the course launches, sign up here!