WordPress is the most favorite and famous platform to build blogs, websites and stores. Around 34% of the web is hosted on WordPress making it one of the most popular content management systems in the world. The keyword “wordpress” is searched around a million times in a single month. There are so many other surprising facts about WordPress that we can count on. This blog is also using WordPress and that’s the reason I am thrilled to write a detailed WordPress Beginner’s Guide about learning WordPress basics. The conclusion is if you are planning to launch a blog, an E-commerce store, a personal website or a publishing platform, WordPress is the No.1 choice. In my WordPress Beginner’s Guide, I’ve tried to sum up the core features of WordPress, recommended host, popular themes, important plugins and some tips for SEO optimization.
Let’s start to learn WordPress!
1. Why Learning WordPress is Important?
WordPress is a content management system to develop a website or blog on your own. No programming or development knowledge needed to run it. Most of the companies now offer a 1-click wordpress install, that’s how simple its installation is. After that some technical knowledge is needed to build up the blog, put images, videos, photo galleries, videos, themes and modify the blog styles. To do all of that yourself, you must start learning WordPress which is pretty easy.
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the founders of WordPress first released the software back in 2003 under GPLv2 license. It’s been a long journey and since that day, WordPress has gained immense reputation and love of people.
But if you are planning to run an online store, some more advanced knowledge and experience will be needed. But still there are 100’s of apps and integration tools that help to create an online store or a business website. WordPress is favorite for creating:
- Personal blogs
- Online stores
- Business websites
- Sports websites
- Project management websites
- Personal portfolios
With the immense growth of WordPress, popular web hosting companies like Bluehost, SiteGround and A2Hosting bring up their hosting plans highly optimized for it. There is now a dedicated hosting program that web hosts offer, it is called Managed WordPress Hosting. It is enriched with unlimited wordpress features and tools.
2. WordPress.com VS WordPress.org
It is very important to understand the difference between both .com and .org platforms. The fact check, you see both have the similar names with a tiny difference of the domain but behind the curtains, it is a different story. So I am just bringing down the curtain and would like to share the core difference between both WordPress programs.
WordPress.Com
If you are an absolute beginner and want to launch a blog just for writing purposes and to build your own articles library, wordpress.com is free to get started with. However, you will get a domain name like “myusername.wordpress.com” after you sign up on wordpress.com. There are certain limitations in the free plan and if you upgrade to Personal or Premium plans, you will get more features with a free domain for one year. The Ecommerce stores and business sites have a monthly price up to $45/month.
WordPress.Org
It is WordPress every one talks about known as Self Hosted WordPress. Why it is called as self hosted? It’s because you need to get a web hosting of your choice with a domain name. Install WordPress and use it and build your blog or site however you want. It is enriched with thousands of free plugins and free themes. WordPress.org is free for life but the costs that will come your way are the domain and hosting charges.
3. Best WordPress Hosting
That’s the most important thing we have to be very careful about. Choosing a web host is a critical step as our business’s future relies on it. Choosing a host whose services go down frequently can result in our business loss. Therefore I will recommend you to choose any host from the following:
It is the high performer and indeed the No.1 web hosting platform in the world. Bluehost runs over 2 million websites and promises the best uptime. Bluehost is officially recommended by wordpress.org for hosting. It comes with a lot of wordpress features and 100s of themes. I’ve recommended it everywhere and it’s my favorite risk and worry free host. Read Bluehost full review here.
it is also the top performing host that has great wordpress hosting plans available at a reasonable price. SiteGround is also among the lists of recommended hosts by wordpress.org. Their wordpress features include WP super cacher, migrator, auto-updates and free wordpress transfer. SiteGround have also developed their own WordPress Migrator Plugin to move your website to SiteGround. Read SiteGround full Review here.
I like both web hosts, their services and wordpress expert support they provide and have my full endorsement.
4. Get Free Domain Name
There are a couple of web hosting services providers that give away a free domain name when you sign up for a hosting plan. Well it is necessary to keep in mind that it is free for only first year. My recommended host Bluehost gives away a free domain name when you sign up for a year or more.
A free domain name is available in popular extensions like .tech, .blog, .online, .store etc.
5. How to Install WordPress?
WordPress installation is not a big deal now. Because of the 1-click WordPress install feature that every popular web host offers, it’s pretty simple and very easy to install in just a couple of minutes. Furthermore, some hosting companies have wordpress pre-installed in their shared hosting plans.
Here is how you can Install WordPress on Bluehost
I will break down the installation steps quickly.
- After you sign up on Bluehost, login to the control paenl
- Go to the Mojo Market place and click on One Click Installs
- You will see the WordPress icon at the top, click on it to install WordPress
- Select the domain where you want to install WP
- In the next step, put the site name of your website which should be professional name, put admin as the admin username and a strong password.
- Wait for some time until the installation completes.
- Now go to the notification center to access all the information of WP installation
- Use those credentials to login to the dashboard to begin with
6. Install WordPress Theme
Our WP installation is complete, however, we are not ready to start posting and publishing. First we need to install a WP theme for the blog. Though professional bloggers recommend to purchase highly SEO optimized and mobile friendly theme. But if you are on a budget, there are still many free themes available that will work for you.
While we are talking about free themes, I like 2 themes that are beautiful and highly optimized.
Especially for affiliate marketers like you, I would strongly recommend to go with GeneratePress. It’s installation is pretty simple & real quick. Let’s check out.
- In your WP dashboard, go to Appearance ==> Themes ==> Add New
There is a search bar at the top right where you can search the theme via its name. As you can see, I searched for Generate Press and it showed me the theme. Just click the install button to install it, simple! Isn’t it?
The theme is installed and now in order to make it live, we need to activate it, so just hit the Activate button.
Boom! Our theme is live and working. Finally, if your theme is in a .zip file, you can upload directly via the Upload theme option. Once you’ll upload it, it will be installed automatically & afterwards, you’ll need to activate it.
7. Install WordPress Plugins
There are over 55K WP plugins in WordPress plugins library. That doesn’t mean we need to install all of them, of course not! Therefore, in order to know which plugins to install and how to install, please follow the below detailed articles.
8. WordPress SEO
Yoast is the best WP plugin for SEO. It is at No.1 in all of the available SEO plugins for blogs. Right after the installation of Yoast, there are a number of tweaks you need to perform in it’s configuration wizard. Just keep in mind that on page SEO requires this plugin to work properly. It is highly recommended plugin for learning WordPress SEO as well. Therefore, configure it in the beginning before writing any post or a page on the blog.
Read the below guides:
How to Setup Best WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast Full Guide
10 Little Changes That will Improve Search Engine Ranking on Google
9. Akismet API Key Activation
Not all of the comments coming on a certain blog are legit, most of the them are spam. In order to protect our blog from spam, we need to activate the Akismet Anti Spam plugin with the help of its key. Honestly saying, if you don’t protect your blog from spammers, they will eat up your site’s bandwidth by spamming. Eventually it will hurt the site’s reputation.
Read the following guide to activate Akismet Anti Spam for free.
10. Submit Your Site to Google
With the help of Yoast and Headers & Footers WP plugins, it is absolutely necessary to submit your site to Google. It is one of the initial steps which is very important to SEO rankings. If you submit your site by all means, at the end of the day, Google will love your site & it’ll bring it up.
Please go through the following tutorials & implement on your blog.
11. General Settings
Finally, it’s time to perform some basic and general settings using the WP dashboard. Scroll down below and head over to settings. Click General to update the blog’s general settings.
- Write the title of your site
- Pick up a tag line and write, should be related to your blog niche
- Update your email address, it’s important as you’ll receive critical and comments notifications
- Update the WP admin and site address. The default is without www, so if you don’t want to change to www, leave these boxes. Don’t worry, they don’t have any impact on SEO. It’s more than a personal choice.
- Change the site’s language if you want to, the default is US English [Optional]
- Update the timezone [Optional]
Change Permalinks
This is the most critical setting and should be done only once. Changing permalinks quite often will destroy your site rankings. Therefore, select the following recommended permalink structure and save it and never change it.
12. Start Keyword Research
We are almost ready to start writing and publishing our content. However, before writing any post or a page on your blog, you need to carry out in depth keyword research. It is a must to do step because right keywords will bring the organic traffic.Therefore, I’ve compiled a list of top 10 best free keyword research tools to get long tail keywords for free.
Time to Wrap it Up
Professional bloggers love WordPress because of its flexibility and search engine optimization. It is enriched with excellent features and thousands of plugins for every requirement. With that being said, learning WordPress is necessary and that is the sole purpose of this short WP beginners guide. It’d have been very long if I put all the content together, that’s why I’ve divided it into separate articles that you’ll need to go through & do it on your blog.
For a newbie blogger, learning WordPress is a great experience. WP is such an excellent platform that if you’ve a little bit technical background or even don’t, you can become a WP pro real quick. Happy Blogging!
SoftwareSpice is a platform that is highly focused to turn Hobby Bloggers in to High Earning Bloggers.
