Make a WordPress Website
If you are thinking of building a website, it can be intimidating, especially if you are not technically inclined. But don’t worry, you are not alone.
Our goal is to provide the most comprehensive step-by-step guide to producing a WordPress website without being a coder. We’ve helped over 400,000+ people make a website with WordPress.
You can use this guide regardless of your age or skill level. You can also contact our free expert team if you need help.
– Table of Contents
Our beginners-friendly guide on how to make a website is the best place to start if you want to do it yourself.
All the steps in this guide can be seen in this overview from start to finish.
- How to find and register a domain name for free
- How to choosing the best web hosting
- How to install WordPress
- Installing a template and customizing your site’s design
- Creating pages in WordPress
- Customizing WordPress with addons and extensions
- Resources to learn WordPress and get support
- Taking it further, building websites with more features (eCommerce stores, membership sites, sell online courses, and more).
We’d like to answer some of the most commonly asked questions before we start creating a website.
Creating a custom website does not require you to be a web developer. Our guide is written for users without coding skills, and we will show you a no-code solution.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s look at everything you need to build your own website.
For your WordPress site to get started, you will need the following three items.
- A domain name – this is the name of your website such as google.com
- WordPress hosting – this is where your website files are stored.
- 45 minutes of your undivided attention.
A website’s development costs really depend on what kind of site you are trying to build. Please refer to our comprehensive 2,000 word guide for more details.
As a personal website, you could spend as little as $100 per year. A business website could cost anywhere from $100 per year to $30,000.
To avoid overspending, we recommend our users start small and add more features as they grow their business.
Here are some tips to build a website for less than $100.
In the future, we will show you how to take it further by adding more features.
Our recommendation is to use self-hosted WordPress for your website platform. There are many website builders available that can help you setup a website.
Nearly 43% of all websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress, the most popular website platform.
In addition to being free and open source, WordPress comes with hundreds of prebuilt website templates and extensions, as well as being extremely flexible and compatible with almost any third-party tool you can imagine.
Perfectwebsolutions, as well as all our other websites, is built on WordPress.
Let’s get started.
As a beginner, one of the most common mistakes is choosing the wrong website platform. You won’t make that mistake since you’re here.
Self-hosted WordPress.org websites are the perfect solution for most users. They come with thousands of themes and addons that allow you to create any kind of site you can imagine.
There are no restrictions on what kind of website you can build with WordPress. You can download and use it for free.
What is the cost of WordPress if it is free?
In order to be able to use WordPress for free, you must set up a custom domain name and web hosting provider. This will cost you money. Read more about why WordPress is free here.
A Your domain name is the address of your site on the internet. It’s what your visitors will enter into their browsers to find it (e.g., Perfectwebsolutions.info).
In order for your website to be visible on the internet, you will need a web host. The web host stores your website’s files. This will be your website’s virtual home.
The cost of a domain name is typically $14.99/year, and the cost of hosting is typically $7.99/month.
Most people who are just starting out find this a lot to handle.
Thanks to Bluehost, our users can register a free domain name and enjoy a 60% discount on web hosting.
Besides being an official WordPress recommended hosting partner, Bluehost is one of the world’s largest hosting companies.
It has been their goal to give back to the community since 2005, and they have been working with WordPress since 2005. They’ve promised us that if you can’t set up your site by following this tutorial, our expert team will do the work for you free of charge. We’ll compensate us, so you don’t have to. For free website setup help, contact us.
Note: We at Perfectwebsolutions are committed to transparency. If you use our referral link to purchase hosting, we will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. In fact, you will receive a discount on hosting + a free SSL + a free domain name if you use our referral link. As a WordPress hosting provider, we would receive a commission if we referred any, but we only recommend products that we personally use and believe will be of value to our readers.
Now that we have our domain name and hosting account, let’s get started.
In the first step, you’ll need to open a new browser window and click the green ‘Get Started Now’ button.
Choosing a hosting plan for your website starts on the pricing page. Among our customers, the basic and plus plans are most popular.
Select the plan you like and proceed to the next step by clicking on select.
After selecting a domain name, you’ll be presented with the next screen.
Make sure your domain name is related to your business, easy to pronounce and spell, and easy to remember if you are choosing a .com domain name.
Choosing the right domain name for your website can be tricky. Check out these tips and tools for guidance.
Click the next button after selecting your domain name.
The next step involves providing your account information, such as your name, address, and email address.
You can also purchase optional extras on this screen. We generally do not recommend these extras. They can always be added later on.
To complete the purchase, you will need to enter your payment information.
A link to your cPanel control panel (web hosting control panel) will be sent to you via email once your purchase is complete.
You’ll install WordPress here, along with supporting features, setting up emails, etc. This is where you’ll manage your hosting account.
You can easily create a WordPress website using Bluehost’s one-click WordPress installer. When you sign up with our link, they’ll automatically install WordPress for you.
Creating a website is as easy as logging into your Bluehost account and clicking the Login to WordPress button to begin.
From your browser, you can also access the WordPress dashboard by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/.
Using Bluehost’s one-click WordPress installer, you can create additional websites with your account. Simply go to the My Sites section and click the button.
For step-by-step instructions on how to install WordPress on different WordPress website hosting services like SiteGround, Hostinger, HostGator, WP Engine, etc, see our comprehensive guide on how to install WordPress.
After WordPress is installed, you can choose a new template and create new pages to customize your website.
Wasn’t that easy?
Let’s move on to the next step and choose a design for your site.
A WordPress theme controls the visual appearance of your site.
You can change the appearance of your WordPress website with themes, which are professionally designed templates.
WordPress sites come with a basic theme. If you visit your website, you’ll see something like this:
The majority of users will find this unappealing.
You can install thousands of free and paid WordPress themes on your site, so no worries.
Click on ‘Add New’ on the Appearance » Themes page of the WordPress admin dashboard to change your theme.
You will be able to sort free WordPress themes by popularity, latest, featured, and other features (such as industry and layout), on the next screen.
Our picks for the best premium WordPress themes and the best free WordPress business themes will help you make the right choice.
As a starting point for this guide, we’re going to use Bento. Bento is a popular, multipurpose, free WordPress theme with flexible design options.
The Astra or Divi WordPress themes are also good choices.
The SeedProd WordPress theme builder is recommended if you want to create entirely custom themes.
You can create a custom WordPress theme without writing a single line of code using our tutorial.
How to Install a Theme in WordPress
The free theme you would like to install can be found by typing its name into the search field.
Search for the free theme by entering its name in the search field if you know its name Install button.
Theme customization is done under the Appearance menu once you’ve installed your theme.
The theme customizer will launch, where you can change your theme settings with a live preview of your website.
You will see a different version of the site customizer if you’re using one of the newer full site editing themes.
Currently, WordPress doesn’t offer a true drag & drop customization experience in the default customizer.
In order to update fonts, change styles, colors, and other items based on the needs of your website, many website professionals and small business owners use a WordPress page builder plugin like SeedProd.
Using WordPress, you can even create a completely custom theme without knowing a line of code.
It’s not necessary to finalize all theme settings right away. Once you have some content on your site, you’ll be able to do so much more easily.
Here’s how to add content to your WordPress site.
In WordPress, posts and pages are the two default content types. Posts belong to the blogging functionality and appear in reverse chronological order.
The difference between pages and posts is that pages contain static “one-off” content such as your about page, contact page, privacy policy, custom landing page, etc.
We’ll show you how to make WordPress show any static page as the homepage of your site later in this guide. WordPress defaults to showing your blog posts on the front page of your site.
If you want to show your recent posts, you can create a separate page for your blog or news section, or you can create a website without any blog section at all.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s add some content to your site.
The first step is to add a few pages to your WordPress site. If you don’t have any content, you can always edit and update them.
You will find the page editor screen under Pages » Add New page within the WordPress admin area. It will look like this:
You need to give your page a title, we will call it ‘Home’.
The first step is to provide a title for your page. I’ll call this one ‘Home’.nks, images, embed videos, audio, etc.
Your page will go live after you click the publish button after adding content.
Add more pages to your website for different sections. For example, an about page, contact us page, and a blog page.
Let’s now add a few blog posts.
You will see the same screen you saw when adding pages earlier when you go to Posts » Add New in your WordPress admin area.
As you enter the visual post editor, you will see more options on the sidebar, such as the possibility of adding a post title and adding content.
The save button allows you to store your post as a draft, and the publish button makes it visible on your site.
Learn how to use all these options on WordPress’s post and page edit screens in our guide on how to add a new post.
As soon as you’ve developed some content for your own website, you’ll be able to customize it to make it look nice for your visitors.
To get started, let’s create a static front page (also known as a homepage).
Setting up a Static Front Page
WordPress admin dashboard » Settings » Reading will allow you to do this. You can also select ‘Pages’ you created earlier for your home and blog pages under the ‘Front page displays’ option.
Be sure to save your changes by clicking the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page.
The ‘Home’ page will now serve as your site’s front page, and the ‘Blog’ page will serve as your blog’s home page.
Title and tagline of the site should be changed
The title of your site can be chosen during installation. A tag line called ‘Just another WordPress site’ is automatically added to your site title by WordPress.
By visiting Settings » General, you can change your site’s title and tagline at any time.
A website’s title is the name of the website, such as Perfectwebsolutions. A tag line describes your website in one line.
As an alternative, you can leave the tag line blank because WordPress SEO plugins such as AIOSEO, Yoast SEO, and many others will override it for better SEO (more on this later).
Save your changes by clicking on the save changes button.
Configure the comments settings
You can allow your users to leave comments on your posts with WordPress’ built-in comment system. The WordPress user engagement is great, but spammers are also targeting it.
You can prevent this by enabling comment moderation on your website.
On the Settings » Discussions page, scroll down to the section titled ‘Before a comment appears’. Ensure that the option ‘Comment must be manually approved’ is checked.
Save your settings by clicking the save changes button.
Create Navigation Menus
You can use navigation menus on your website to direct your users to different pages or sections. In your WordPress theme, you display menus using WordPress’ powerful navigation menu system.
Here’s how to add a navigation menu to your website.
The first step is to visit the Appearance » Menus page. Click on the create menu button and give your navigation menu a name.
Now WordPress will create your navigation menu. At the moment, it will be empty.
The next step is to select the pages you wish to display in your menu and then click the add to menu button.
The empty area of your navigation menu will be filled by the selected pages. The menu items can be moved up and down to rearrange their order.
The next step is to select a location for the display. Your WordPress theme defines these locations. Your website header typically contains a primary menu that appears in most WordPress themes.
To save your navigation menu, click on the save menu button.
The menu can now be viewed on your website.
You can find more detailed instructions on how to add a navigation menu to WordPress in our beginner’s guide.
You can think of WordPress plugins as apps for your WordPress site. Your WordPress site can be customized and enhanced with these plugins. Consider a contact form, a photo gallery, etc.
The Plugins page in your WordPress dashboard is where you can install plugins.
The number of free plugins available for WordPress currently exceeds 59,000. Plugins can also be purchased from third-party websites and developers.
When there are so many plugins available, how do you choose which ones to install? You’ll also find all the information you need in our guide on how to pick the best WordPress plugins.
These are the essential plugins that you need to install on your site right away. There is no charge for any of them.
Features
- WPForms – The WPForms Lite plugin adds a contact form to your WordPress website. Contact information is displayed on the same page as the contact form on all professional websites.
- MonsterInsights – Connect MonsterInsights with Google Analytics to see how visitors interact with and find your website.
- SeedProd – Create completely custom designs & layouts with SeedProd, a drag-and-drop page builder.
Website Optimization
- WordPress SEO All in One – Increase Google traffic with this plugin.
- Boost the speed of your WordPress website with WP Super Cache, a free caching plugin for WordPress.
- You can use PushEngage to reconnect with visitors after they leave your website, helping to increase website traffic. Perfectwebsolutions’s top 5 traffic sources are push notifications.
Security
- UpdraftPlus – Backup your website automatically with UpdraftPlus or Duplicator.
- Sucuri – Virus scanner and website security audit by Sucuri
Extras
- The WP Simple Pay plugin makes it easy to accept credit card payments in WordPress.
- Create an eCommerce website with WordPress using WooCommerce. Easy-to-use tool for setting up an online store and selling physical products.
- Online courses and digital memberships can be easily created and sold with MemberPress.
- It’s easy to add Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube widgets with Smash Balloon.
- You can use OptinMonster to get more email subscribers and optimize conversion rates on your website with dynamic popups, modals, and other smart personalization features.
- Your WordPress website can be enhanced with free live chat, email marketing for newsletters, and CRM using HubSpot. With OptinMonster, it works seamlessly.
- Automate your small business workflows with Uncanny Automator and save time.
- PHP Mail configuration issues on managed WordPress hosting providers can be resolved by using WP Mail SMTP.
- WordPress image gallery plugin Envira Gallery Lite
Do you need help installing plugins? Learn how to install a WordPress plugin with our step-by-step guide.
You can find more WordPress plugin recommendations in our list of 24 must-have plugins for business websites.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a WordPress website, install essential plugins, add a new theme, and add new web pages.
Would you like to go even further?
A WordPress website can do much more than just create a niche website.
- Add an eCommerce store
- Start your own podcast
- Create a membership Website
- Create a web directory
- Create a coupons website
- Build a reviews website
- Create multilingual websites
- Create a Job Board website
- Create a question and answers website
- Create a wiki knowledge base website
For more examples, check out our list of 19 types of websites you can create with WordPress.
