Getting a WordPress website up and running is a lot easier than you might think. And if you’re on a budget and can’t afford a designer and developer, this is the way to go. It’s DIY and it’s going to give you a simple website.
We’re going to forego the ‘geekiness’ and technical terminology and just get this up and running.
The first thing you need is a web host. The web host is the place where your website is going to live. Let’s call it a neighborhood. It takes care of your website and provides some security.
You will need to sign up for webhosting; I use and recommend SiteGround. Their customer services is 10,000+ on a scale from 1 – 10. If you get in the weeds, they are going to pull you back out.
They offer a few different plans.
StartUp: Choose this plan if you just need one website.
GrowBig: Choose this plan if you would like more than one website for multiple streams of income for multiple hobbies or niches. This is the best seller and it is the plan I use.
GoGeek: Choose this plan if you anticipate high traffic or need extra space for larger websites.
You are either going to buy a domain name or use a domain name that you have already purchased.
If you need to purchase a domain name, you can do that with SiteGround. If your website will have an extension other than .com, you can choose from the list of alternate extensions when choosing your domain name. Alternate extensions are useful when the .com extension of your preferred domain name is already taken.
At this writing, a SiteGround domain name is $15.95 per year (there is no monthly option available; you will pay for the year upfront).
If you have already purchased a domain name from a different company, you may use that domain name for your hosting. Just enter your domain name, and SiteGround will help you pull that domain name over to their service.
And then you will proceed through the checkout process.
After your purchase has finalized, you will receive an email from SiteGround. (Be sure to save this email as it will contain important information that you may need to access again.) This email will contain your login for your customer area (you set this up during the checkout process), and this begins the magic.
The customer area is where you get your WordPress installed, and you will spend quite a bit of time here, until the installation is complete.
As per any reputable hosting company, they will show you updates and promotions, but where you will need to go is to the My Accounts section. (You will probably only see one URL in the list; disregard my list.) This is a list of the domains/packages that you currently have.
You have a Go to Admin panel which takes you straight to your WordPress website, but we don’t want to do that yet, because we haven’t installed WordPress.
Your next step is to click the red button: Go to CPanel. Once you get there, you may think it looks a little intimidating. It looks a little old school too – it’s been around since God was a boy 🙂 and it hasn’t changed! Just be forewarned that you will never use 90% of what you see in the CPanel. It is nice to have it there, but you are never really going to use it.
What you are interested in right now is your Auto Installer. There are all kinds of installers you can use, but all we’re concerned with is WordPress. Just click WordPress.
In the next video, we will walk through the Install process. This video is mainly to get the hosting package. Now we’re where the magic is starting; we’re going to get our website installed. It is easy peasy – we’re just going to click a button.
See you in the next video!
