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. My blog is also using WordPress and that’s the reason I am thrilled to write a detailed WordPress Beginner’s Guide. 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. What is WordPress?
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.
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.
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. Basic WordPress Settings
Our WP installation is complete, however, we are not ready to start posting and publishing. There are many tweaks and settings to perform before bringing our blog live to public.