How to Start a WordPress Site from Scratch

In 2016, WordPress was the most popular CMS in the world with nearly 75 million websites and that was 4 years ago.

Building your own website is great if you have a business or a blog. You can create beautifully designed pages and add unique plugins.

There are SEO plugins to help generate more traffic to your website.

You can also optimize your website for speed.

Overall, WordPress gives you a lot of flexibility that other CMS’ don’t offer. But if you want to learn how to start a WordPress site from scratch, you need to be familiar with 7 critical steps to designing the perfect website

1. Pick a Plan

First of all, you need to decide what kind of website you are creating and what the purpose of it will be. In addition, you need to decide if you are going to choose a free plan, there’s only one, or a paid plan.

If you choose a free plan, you still have to pay for a domain, a hosting provider, and plugins and themes.

After the free plan, you can choose to pay $5 a month for a personal site. You have more flexibility to add more personality to your site.

A step up from the $5 plan is the premium plan at $8 per month. It’s designed more for freelancers and bloggers.

After the premium plan is the business plan at $25 per month. It comes with more design options. You also get live support and Google Analytics with this plan.

The final plan is the eCommerce plan at $45 a month. This plan allows you to open an online store.

Picking a plan is the initial stage of how to start a WordPress site from scratch.

2. Choose a Domain Name

Choosing your domain name is unique to you. In other words, it’s how people find your website. It’s what they type in the search bar to get to your website.

When you choose a domain name, you also need a hosting provider. They will actually store your website.

Choosing a domain name is not as easy as you think. You have to be strategic about it. You don’t want a complicated name that is difficult to type in the search bar.

For instance, if you had a pie business, you don’t want your domain name to be, TheBestDivinePiesInTheWorld.com. You should choose a domain name that’s a little shorter and something that matches your business name.

Instead of having that super long pie domain name, it could simply be, BDPies, short for best divine pies.

3. Choose Your Theme

You can make your WordPress site as unique as you want when you choose a theme.

Some themes and templates contain different layouts and colors. You can either choose WordPress themes that are free or choose a paid theme that can offer something more unique.

You can also choose themes based on your business and what you are trying to convey to your audience when they visit your website. After you choose a theme, you can custom it to make it how you like.

4. Create Pages and Features

After you choose a theme you can add pages and features to your website to give it more depth.

When you learn how to create a WordPress site from scratch, this part may be the most complex. Creating pages and features takes a lot of work and practice.

The value of creating pages and features is that you can add a blog post or a portfolio.

Pages direct the visitor to different parts of your website. You might have a section “about me” and a section titled “blog.” Having pages is like a site map of where to find areas of your website.

5. Design Your Website

Customizing your website gives you the option to make it unique to you. One of the ways you can make it unique is by having a static page, which means it’s unchanging. Visitors won’t see your latest post, they will see the same page.

Or you can choose to have visitors see your latest post on the home page.

You can also design and customize the navigation bar. You can make it colorful or even have fancy titles in the navigation bar.

6. Install Plugins

Plugins enhance the visitor’s experience. It also gives you the opportunity to optimize your website.

Examples of plugins include SEO plugins, which allow you to drive more traffic to your website. You can also install specific analytics plugins that give you insight on how your website is performing on certain days or weeks.

You just have to search for the plugin you want on your WordPress site. Some of them are free and some you will have to pay for.

You can also check out the Beaver Builder Addons for your website, similar to plugins.

7. Optimize Your Website

Lastly, you want to optimize your website to make sure it’s mobile-friendly and it’s up to speed.

You can enable website caching that stores website data to your visitors’ browsers. It essentially makes your website faster.

You can install a caching plugin to ensure that your website is able to perform at faster speeds.

Overall, each of these steps will give you insight on how to create a website from scratch. You’ll be less confused and more prepared to optimize your website.