Many friends have asked me how to build a clean and professional WordPress blog step by step so I decided to take the time to write an introductory tutorial on building a website.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog without any technical knowledge. I hope it will be helpful to those who are beginners and ready to use WordPress to build a successful WordPress blog.
So,
how to build a WordPress blog?
how to build a WordPress blog from scratch?
How do I create a professional WordPress blog?
Is it difficult to build a website with WordPress?
How much does it cost to build your own WordPress website?
Which web hosting speed service is better?
In response to those questions, the article Building a clean and Professional WordPress blog step by Step will give detailed answers to website-building beginners.
Ok, let's first look at the main contents of this article: Build a clean and professional WordPress blog step by step.
In fact, building a clean and professional WordPress blog step by step is not as difficult as everyone thinks, especially using WordPress to build a website, it is easier than eating watermelon, and it can be done in minutes. The following is the "WordPress fast website building tutorial".
In fact, building a fully self-hosted website is not as difficult as you might think, especially if you use WordPress. In this article, we will share with you how to quickly get your WordPress website up and running in just 15 minutes.
Building a WordPress website seems to be difficult in the eyes of people who don’t know how to do it. Generally, they will entrust a website-building company to help. The price I know generally starts at 20,000.
Creating a WordPress blog is also very easy and there are extremely powerful plugins that allow you to implement various advanced functions. It can be said that the same is true for the Android operating system.
But as simple as getting started with WordPress is, it’s still important to know what you need to do and how to do it so you don’t waste time.
These 2 articles, SiteGround and Bluehost, have helped many users create their own blogs and websites, and have received positive feedback from readers.
However, in order to help more users build a clean and professional WordPress blog step by step without any basic knowledge of website development and programming, released this comprehensive and detailed blog site construction and operation getting started guide.
Therefore, people who pay more attention to website management can learn from this tutorial.
In fact, whether you're an 18-year-old or a 70-year-old, you can start a WordPress blog by following the detailed instructions in this article. But if you need help, we will do our best to help you solve the problem.
Next, let's take a look at the specific content and detailed operation steps of building a clean and professional WordPress blog step by step.
Step-by-step preparation to build a clean and professional WordPress blog
In general, three conditions are required to build a WordPress blog site (in fact, all websites need these three conditions):
- The domain name (the domain name is the name of the blog site, such as answersrates.com. Of course, you can buy the domain name separately, or you can directly purchase the domain name on the website hosting host; if you buy the domain name separately, Bluehost is recommended. In addition, also sorted out how to You can refer to the tutorial on choosing a website domain name);
- Website hosting account (this is the address where the website and all files and content of the website are stored, equivalent to a network hard drive or cloud storage device);
- You need to take 30 minutes to concentrate and complete the construction and setup of the website;
You read that right, you can complete the construction of a blog site from scratch within 30 minutes, and we will guide you step by step to complete the construction of the blog.
This tutorial will cover the following sections:
- How to register a domain name for free;
- How to choose the best web hosting;
- How to install WordPress and set up a WordPress blog;
- How to change the blog design template;
- How to write your first blog post;
- How to use plugins to configure WordPress blog functions;
- How to add a contact form;
- how to set up Google Analytics tracking for the website;
- how to optimize the website;
- How blogs can be monetized;
- Learn and master WordPress resources;
OK, then let's get to the point of setting up a free blog using WordPress step by step.
WordPress Blog Tutorial
This article will show you how to use WordPress in 7 steps to building a WordPress blog independent website on Bluehost hosting.
Step 1: Purchase a Domain Name and Managed Hosting Services, Install an SSL Certificate
The most common mistake many new website builders make is choosing the wrong blogging platform. But thankfully everyone visited this site, and you have avoided the possibility of making this mistake again.
According to statistics, 95% of users will choose WordPress.org as the platform for self-hosted WordPress websites. Why is this?
Because the platform is free, users can install plugins on this platform, personalize the look of the blog site, and most importantly, monetize without any restrictions.
Many well-known blog sites use WordPress as a website-building program, and about 34% of the websites on the Internet around the world use WordPress to build their websites. Many people will wonder why WordPress is free? What's so attractive about it?
In fact, the attraction is not particularly obvious. It is free because users need to build and host their own websites. In other words, users only need to prepare a domain name and web hosting.
A website domain name is a name that users enter into a search engine, and that name can lead web users to your website. It is the website address, which guides users to find your website on Haohai's website. For example, baidu.com or answersrates.com.
The hosting host of a website refers to the place where website files and website data are stored. It is the house where your website is located, similar to a network hard drive. Every website needs to have managed hosting.
Typically a domain name costs $14.99 per year, while web hosting costs normally $7.99 per month. For beginners, this is not a small expense.
However, Bluehost, Hostinger, and Cloudways, the website hosting hosts officially recommended by WordPress, all provide users with free domain names and have launched a 60% discount on the website hosting page.
Bluehost is the oldest website hosting provider on the Internet. Bluehost has been the official WordPress hosting provider since 2005. It is also the most well-known brand of managed WordPress hosting, after all, it hosts tens of millions of websites. This website is also hosted on Bluehost (if you are interested, you can refer to the Bluehost website building tutorial), but the Bluehost host is used.
Bluehost Host is a website hosting host company.
Note: If you sign up for a hosting account using the referral link provided by us, we can also earn a small commission, but you don't need to spend extra, because the commission earned by this site is not your money. In fact, this site can recommend any WordPress web hosting host to earn commissions, but this site only recommends products that have been used and are believed to provide value-added services to you.
Let's get to the point: how to start a WordPress blog on Bluehost hosting.
First, visit the homepage of Bluehost hosting and click the "Buy Now" button.
After accessing the next page, select "Hosting", and then select the corresponding package and the corresponding year of use. Finally, click "Buy Now".
After clicking to enter the next page, you will be asked if you have prepared a domain name or not. Click "None" to enter the domain name registration page. Note that the suffix I chose here is .com. It is best for independent stations engaged in e-commerce to use suffixes such as .com, .org, and .net, but .com is the first choice.
Then we click the "Continue" button.
After selecting the domain name, we choose the domain name age corresponding to the hostage, so as to save the trouble later. Then click " Select " to the right of the domain name, then click " Checkout " under the shopping cart on the right to pay.
After entering the checkout page, click " Continue Payment " at the bottom.
Next, enter the personal account registration page, click the " 10 seconds to register an account " button, and then fill in your relevant information.
After filling in the personal information according to the prompts inside, click OK, and then enter the payment link.
You can choose to pay with Alipay or pay with PayPal.
After completing the payment, the email address used when registering the Bluehost account will receive several emails, including domain name invoice email, web hosting invoice email, domain name registration success email, domain name and web hosting invoice email, login cPanel (meaning control panel) Username and password for your account (in an email addressed to Bluehost Sales Team, you can find your username and password under Managing your Website).
To install WordPress, you must first resolve the domain name. Enter your own account and follow the order of Manage Orders "List/ Search Orders". Then click on the domain name you just registered, and select Name Servers on the page that appears to prepare for resolution.
Next, enter the email titled Bluehost Sales Team, and find the address for parsing under Accessing your Website, similar to the following format:
- Name Server 1: ns1.md-HK-20.bluehostwebservers.com
- Name Server 2: ns2.md-HK-20.bluehostwebservers.com
Then, paste the two resolution addresses into the text boxes with red asterisks below, and then click Update Name Servers to perform domain name resolution. After 24-72 hours, the parsing takes effect.
Next, we go into cPanel and install the free SSL certificate.
Log in to your personal account, and also follow the order of Manage Orders > List / Search Orders (Manage Orders > List /Search Orders). Then click on the purchased hosting service, and select Manage Web Hosting to enter cPanel. Then find SSL/TLS in the Security column and click it.
On the pop-up page, find " Install and Manage SSL for your site (HTTPS) " at the bottom and click it. Find the Install an SSL Website option at the bottom of the new page that pops up, click the Domain drop-down menu below, select your own domain name, and then click Autofill by Domain to automatically install the SSL certificate.
Finally, click the Install Certificate blue button at the bottom of the page.
Step 2: Install the WordPress website builder and initial setup
In cPanel, find the WordPress icon and click Install.
After the installation is complete, your WordPress site is set up successfully.
- You can see that your website domain name is ccc.com
- The way to log in to the back end of the WordPress website is ccc.com/wp-admin/. The login username and password are the username and password set during the installation process.
If you are using a website hosting hosts such as SiteGround, HostGator, or WP Engine, the entire installation process is similar to this.
After the WordPress installation is complete, we can set up our new site.
Getting to Know the Backend of a WordPress Blog Site
To enter the backend of your WordPress site, just type http://www.ccc.com/wp-admin/ in the search bar, where ccc refers to your domain name. For example, if I want to enter the backend of timorlestelist.com, I just need to enter https://www.answersrates.com/wp-admin/.
Next, you will see the WordPress login interface. Then we enter the account and password when we just installed WordPress to log in to the backend of the WordPress blog site.
- Welcome message: This is one of the most important interfaces for WordPress webmasters, and there are many quick links in it.
- The current status of the website and the content of the website being run.
- Articles - Posts: Here you can create blog posts.
- Media-Media: Here you can upload photos and other media files and manage them.
- Pages - Pages: Here you can create secondary pages.
- Comments-Comments: Click here to modify comments.
- Appearance-Appearance: Here you can change the appearance design of the website.
- Plugins-Plugins: New plugins can be installed here.
- User-Users: Here you can manage the accounts of all website users.
- Settings-Settings: main settings.
Setting up permalinks for building a WordPress blog
A permalink is an address related to a single web page, which is often referred to as a URL. To set up permalinks, you need to follow Settings→Permalinks in the dashboard of the backend of your WordPress blog site.
The setting of fixed links is also very particular. For example, whether to add www in front of the link and which weblink to choose will be good for future website SEO, all of which need our attention.
But we generally choose to use the article name as our permalink. If your site is a news site, you can also choose the option to include the date. After all, the news is updated every day, and it is not a problem to divide the news articles by date.
Authorize or disable search engines from crawling your WordPress site
In the background of the WordPress website control panel, users can set whether the website is retrieved by Google. If you want to confirm that Google can retrieve WordPress site information, you can follow the steps in Settings → Reading.
Next, do not authorize Google to crawl your WordPress site, check " Suggest that search engines not index this site ", and then click " Save Changes " below.
This means that there will be many modifications in the process of creating a website. If each modification is retrieved by Google, there will be a lot of useless information, which is not friendly to the optimization and ranking of the website.
After setting the page, appearance, etc. of our website, uncheck this option when publishing the article.
Step 3: Choose a WordPress blog site theme (ie choose a website template)
The look and feel of a WordPress blog site are determined by the site theme (that is, the site template). When we visit a website for the first time, it often doesn't look very good. So we need to make changes to the look and feel of the site.
There are thousands of pre-designed WordPress themes available online for us to use, but some are free and some are paid.
If you want to change the theme of the WordPress blog site, we only need to find the appearance option in the dashboard at the back end of the website, and then operate in the order of appearance → theme.
Next, we will find more than 7,400 free WordPress themes in the new interface, which are all free plugins on the WordPress.org theme website. We can sort by popularity, development time, and features, as well as other features such as industry, and site layout.
We can slide the mouse on the theme, and then we will see two buttons for installation and preview. Click the preview button to see the design style of the theme and the appearance of the website.
The preview theme may be different from the actual interface, which is normal because we also need to customize the theme, but we can set this step up later. All we have to do is look at the theme's design style, overall colors, font settings, and some other aspects of the site's appearance.
Here, I suggest that everyone should choose a minimalist theme. Because the lightweight minimalist theme makes the entire blog site look clean, there are not so many cluttered sections and pictures, and at the same time, it can also take into account the reading experience of readers.
Once you find a theme you like, click the Install button. Then wait for the installation to complete. Once the installation is complete, the previous install button will be replaced by the enable button. Next, we click the Enable button to use the current theme.
After the theme is enabled, we can also customize the theme, which is equivalent to our preliminary settings for the overall appearance of the website. To personalize the theme of your website, you need to follow the steps of Appearance → Customize on the backend of your website.
When setting all website themes, you need to pay attention to the Homepage section. There are generally two options after clicking: your latest article and a static page. If the latest article is selected, the homepage style of the website is a list-style blog article;
If you choose the option of a static page, we also need to create two pages (ie web pages). To create a page, in the website's dashboard (ie, the website background), following the order of page → new page, we create two pages respectively - one is the home page, and the other we can name the blog post.
Then we return to the home page settings panel just now, select the home page setting option to select the page of the home page just created, and select the blog post page just created for the article page.
Remember to hit the publish button when customizing your WordPress site theme.
With the theme set up, we can create our first blog post.
Step 4: Create your first blog post
To publish a new blog post, go back to the dashboard of your WordPress site, find the Posts option, and follow the steps from Posts → Write Posts.
The process of publishing an article blog is similar to the process of publishing a web page. The editing interface of the blog is also almost the same, and the options are also almost the same.
The default editor in WordPress today is the Gutenberg editor, and all elements (such as text blocks, media blocks, design blocks, widget blocks, and embed blocks) are presented as blocks. We can use these blocks to write text, insert pictures, insert shortcodes, insert HTML codes, insert video codes, insert lists, insert numbers, insert videos, etc. If you are not used to this block editor, you can also install the classic editor to return to the original editor version.
There are a few more issues to be aware of on this blog post page. The first is categories and tags. We can use categories and tags to organize all the articles on the website and classify blog posts according to different attributes. We have also written about the difference between categories and tags before, and I strongly recommend that you take a look at the article categories VS tags.
For example, your website is an affiliate marketing blog site about product reviews. There are many product categories such as electronic products, personal care, clothing, clothing, etc., which can be used as article categories. The jeans under the clothing category can be used as a label. To be precise, the scope of tags is much smaller than that of categories.
When you're done writing your blog post, click the Publish button at the top right of the page to publish your post.
Many beginners tend to confuse the post and page buttons in the backend of a WordPress site. Just to clarify – an article refers to a blog post, and a page refers to a web page.
In a nutshell, the difference between a page and an article on a WordPress blog site is:
- Articles are time-sensitive and time-sensitive; pages are not affected by time;
- Articles have social attributes; pages have no social attributes;
- Articles are organized and divided by categories and tags; pages are hierarchically divided and can be organized and divided through sub-pages and parent pages;
- The article has the RSS push attribute; the page does not have this attribute;
- Articles have an author and publication date; pages do not have an author and publication date;
Step 5: Plugins and Personalization
Plugins for a website are for enriching the functionality of the website, while themes are for the appearance of the website. However, some paid themes also integrate some plugins when they are developed. These plugins may be free or paid.
After writing the first blog post, we may also need to add other features to the website, such as a contact form, image gallery, content slider, contact subscription form, etc.
To achieve these functions, we need to use WordPress plugins. WordPress plugins are applications that we can use without any knowledge of coding to enrich the functionality of our website.
There are currently more than 55,000 free WordPress plugins. This means that no matter what kind of functionality you want to add to your website, there is always a plugin that you can use.
Create a Contact Form for a WordPress Blog
Almost every website needs a contact form. Other users can email the blog webmaster directly through the contact form. Because WordPress does not come with a contact form function, we need a contact form plugin to add a contact form to the website.
Here we recommend the Contact Form 7 plugin. This is a very popular free contact form plug-in, and it is also a plug-in recommended for everyone. About 5 million users are using the plugin, Aina.
When installing this plugin, you need to follow the order of plugins → install the plugin in the background of the WordPress blog site, and then enter Contact Form 7 in the search bar, and then you will see the Contact Form 7 plugin. Next, we click the Install button and click the Enable button after the installation is complete so that the Contact Form 7 plugin is enabled.
Next, find the Contact → Contact Form on the dashboard interface in the background of the website, and the following interface will appear:
You can see that there are 3 contact forms that exist by default, and you can also see the edit button and the shortcode in the red box (that is, the shortcode [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]). The default fields in the first contact form are Username, User Email, Subject, and Information.
Generally, these 4 fields are enough for the contact form of our blog's contact page.
Next, we are going to create a page called Contact and paste the contact form shortcode (shortcode) into the newly created page.
We operate in the background of the WordPress blog website in the order of page → new page, then enter the contact in the title, and then press the enter key to enter the content writing section. Then we click the + sign at the top left of the blank editor and then select the code under the Text block.
Next, we paste the shortcode of Contact form 1 into the text editor that appears and finally click the publish button at the top right of the editor.
At this point, our contact page is complete.
SEO Optimized WordPress Blog
Many beginners start blogs without optimizing their blogs. Website optimization ranking and SEO can help other users find your webpage and website in search engines such as Google and Bing. If you want more traffic, it's important to optimize your blog and website right from the start.
To optimize the ranking of a WordPress blog website, first, we need to install and use the SEO plugin. Here, we recommend that you use Rank Math, a website optimization plugin. This is a very powerful free WordPress SEO plugin that can help you optimize your website effectively.
First, we need to install and start the plugin. After the startup is complete, we will enter the Rank Math setup wizard interface.
This setup wizard interface will guide us through the basic setup of our WordPress blog site, so I won’t go into too much detail here. For more information about Rank Math, please refer to the previous Rank Math tutorial – the most powerful free SEO plugin in the field of WordPress website optimization.
In addition, we also recommend a WordPress blog website speed-up tutorial, a WordPress website SEO guide, and related content on website image optimization. These articles will definitely help your WordPress to quickly increase traffic.
More WordPress Plugins and Personalization
The number of WordPress plugins a website can install is unlimited, but the more plugins you may have installed, the slower your website will load. However, there are some very important WordPress plugins that we must use.
The following is a plug-in that must be used by a website selected, please refer to it.
- Website Backup – Updraft is the best WordPress website backup plugin. We can regularly back up the WordPress blog website to avoid data loss due to website errors. Here, we also organize the Updraft tutorial, which can back up and restore the website for your reference.
- Website Security – Sucuri is the best free security plugin for WordPress blog sites. For all beginners, we have also launched the ultimate WordPress website security protection tutorial. This article will definitely help you improve the security factor of your WordPress website.
- Website Performance – We recommend using WP Super Cache, a website caching plugin, and WP Rocket (paid plugin) to speed up your WordPress blog site. For more solutions on website performance, please refer to the WordPress Speed and Performance Tutorial.
- Design and Personalization – We recommend Beaver Builder, Elementor Pro, and Divi web builder. Using these tools, users can set up website homepages, create landing pages, and even customize themes without any knowledge of coding.
Step 6: Monetize your blog
At this point you have created a blog site and also set up the site according to your personal preferences. Next, you might be wondering how I make money with a blog site.
There are many ways to successfully monetize a blog, but we must also admit that there is no get-rich-quick method in this world.
Don't be fooled by those expensive cars and luxurious pictures, because many of them are fake.
Different from other online earning articles, we have also compiled articles on how to make money with WordPress blog sites, which you can read for reference.
if you also want to make money through a blogging website, be sure to read it. After all, this article integrates the mainstream methods of making money online.
As long as you are willing to put in and put in the effort, it will definitely pay off. But keep in mind that there are no shortcuts to making money.
Here are some of the best ways to monetize your WordPress blog:
Google AdSense
Many WordPress bloggers advertise on their websites. So if you want to monetize your WordPress blog, be sure to use Google AdSense.
Google AdSense is the largest advertising platform that bloggers and any content publisher can use to make money. The platform acts as a middleman between you and advertisers.
Google allows advertisers to match content on blog sites for specific keywords. At the same time, the blog site owner can also receive a certain fee from the advertisement.
Therefore, we need to learn how to add Google AdSense to a WordPress site.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is also the second profit method often used by blog owners. Generally speaking, webmasters can recommend products or services they like to visitors, fans, and audiences on their own websites, and when they purchase these products or services, webmasters can get a portion of the commission.
This is actually one of the most common ways to make money online. Whether you are a blog site owner or a self-media content contributor, you are using affiliate marketing to make money consciously or unintentionally.
Of course, you can publish product review articles on your own WordPress blog and make a website like Top 10 Reviews. You can also use Content Egg and Rehub to build a professional affiliate marketing website that integrates daily purchases, price comparisons, and product evaluations to make your WordPress blog website more powerful.
In short, the key to affiliate marketing is to recommend high-quality products and services, preferably ones that you have personally experienced and trusted. There are also many affiliate marketing plugins and tools for WordPress sites online that can help us make more money.
Open an online store
Because WordPress is an open-source website-building platform that focuses on content writing, there are many WordPress plugins that can extend the functionality of your blog. The WooCommerce plugin can turn a blog website into an online store, and then we can use the most basic blog functions of WordPress to publish articles, and then drain traffic to the store.
Therefore, many users are selling goods or services directly on their blog sites. These products come in various forms, including physical products, and downloadable digital products (such as e-books, music, mini-programs, etc.).
This recommended WooCommerce plugin to build an online store, after all, it belongs to the best e-commerce WordPress plugin. At the same time, this plugin is also the most used e-commerce website builder in the world.
For more information on building an online store, you can refer to our WooCommerce building an online store tutorial.
In short, we can use our WordPress blog site to do more things. We can use blogs for product evaluation, fashion blogs, food blogs, and travel blogs to output content. Different blog types offer unique opportunities for bloggers to make money.
We can even turn our blog into a multi-seller mall-like online retail platform like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Flipkart.
Content payment and knowledge monetization
Content payment and knowledge monetization have been very popular in recent years, but in fact, this method has already existed in real life. As far as the content monetization of WordPress blogs is concerned, there are generally the following three ways:
- Paid reading – Paid reading generally involves the commercialization of articles, and each article becomes a knowledge commodity, written once, and can be sold multiple times. At the same time, you can also set up a paid area, and readers need to pay a fee to view the hidden content. Knowledge, experience, notes, resources, diaries, pictures, stories, and anything else someone else is willing to pay for can use paid reading to earn income. For example, we only set 50% of an article to be visible, and the remaining 50% of readers need to pay to view and read;
- Content reward – The content reward is to add a reward function on your own website. If readers like our articles, they can click the reward button on the article page, and then call us by payment method. This is one of the most common ways to monetize content on the market today. The foreign counterpart is generally the donation function.
- Paid Q&A – Paid Q&A is a knowledge monetization system specially built for knowledge-based users. Users can answer paid questions raised by questioners and turn knowledge, experience, and opinions into income. Users can earn a certain fee for forwarding content.
we also have a special tutorial for building a knowledge-based paid WordPress website, which you can also refer to and read.
Step 7: Learn WordPress Knowledge and Technology
There are many blogs and tutorial websites on WordPress website building. One of the goals is to help more beginners slowly master the website building technology from scratch.
Website development technology used to belong to professionals, but now with the WordPress website builder, everyone can become a master website builder, and everyone can quickly understand the content and knowledge of website building and website operation.
You must know that many large websites and apps. There are Amazon and eBay first;
Here, there are also Blogging sections, which can definitely help many beginners to understand the basic knowledge of website construction and website operation.
Of course, you can create a blog to communicate with other users. Unlike many other blogs, the blog is that a lot of knowledge is open and free. The purpose of this blog is to help more newbies and people who know nothing about programming and coding to complete website building.
Of course, you can also click the subscribe button on this webpage or the bell icon at the bottom right of the webpage to subscribe to the content of this blog.
Another section of the blog is Business Ideas, where some business and investment developments will be released, including some profitable projects.
This section is combined with the WordPress tutorial section to help you learn more cutting-edge ideas in the field of website building.
What is WordPress?
To quote Wikipedia:
WordPress is a free and open-source blogging software and content management system based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress has a plugin architecture and templating system. As of April 2018, over 30.6% of the top 10 million websites use WordPress.
WordPress is the most popular website content management system. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system on the Internet. WordPress stands out at the most famous stage of web publishing. Today, it is used on over 70 million sites.
The above is an explanation from Wikipedia, very official.
Still don't quite understand what WordPress is?
Every website has its own management background. WordPress is such a program that provides us with a website background. We can use WordPress for free to build our own website, and due to the powerful open-source function of WordPress, there are many types of websites that can be built with WordPress, such as personal blogs, corporate official websites, or e-commerce websites.
Why use WordPress?
First of all, as mentioned above, WordPress is free open-source software. There are many types of websites that WordPress can build, such as personal blogs, e-commerce websites, and corporate official websites. The most important thing is that WordPress is really easy to operate.
Isn’t WordPress from abroad? But what should I do if my English is not good, can WordPress still be used? WordPress has dozens of languages to choose from, Chinese or English, you can switch by yourself. Compared with Magento, the operation of WordPress is relatively simple, so for many small partners who want to build personal websites, personal blogs, and e-commerce websites, Highly recommend WordPress.
How much does it cost to build a website?
.com international domain name $8.99 Siteground hosting $71.4 GrowBig plan $71.4 WordPress theme template $50 (lifetime use) SSL security certificate free CDN acceleration free total cost of about $130 (about 925RMB)
A very professional website can be built for about 130 dollars, but everyone's understanding and acceptability are different. As for how much time and cost it takes, it will vary from person to person.
Is it difficult to build a website?
Like most sellers, I'm not a programmer, and I don't know any code. Even so, I really don't have less toss when building the website, haha... If you are like me, you are a beginner and don't understand code. But what if you want to build a professional website/blog?
It is recommended to use WordPress plus a professional template to achieve it. It is really not too difficult, but it takes some time to learn and use. Of course, if you are B2C and want to get started quickly, you can use Shopify to build it.
Shopify is faster for beginners to get started. As for which one should you choose between Shopify and WordPress? This depends on your actual situation...
Beginners need to know when choosing a WordPress program to build a website
Today, it is really easy for us to build our own website. Buy a domain name, a cloud server, quickly deploy the WEB system, and then use the free and open-source WordPress program to build our own website.
However, many of us directly update the website operation after building the website. In fact, this approach is wrong. After we build and install the website, we cannot update the website content immediately, and there are still many things to do in the middle. If you don't do these things, you will encounter various troubles and problems in the operation later.
In this section, we are going to introduce a few things that need to be done after opening a WordPress website. Whether you are an experienced webmaster or a beginner who is learning to build a website for the first time, I personally think these contents are worthy of our recognition. Known.
First, choose a decent logo
Whether we create our own theme, use the default theme, or even use other free or paid WordPress theme templates. Generally, there will be a LOGO icon representing the image of the website, some will be in the upper left corner, and some will be in the top middle.
In fact, this LOGO is also very important. It is the image representative of my website. If you design a LOGO at will, it will give people the feeling that the website is not atmospheric enough.
If we have artistic creation skills, we can set a LOGO icon according to the elements, domain name, and name of the website, or we can use many free online LOGO-making tools on the Internet to achieve it. In short, we can't just do one randomly and don't care.
Second, make sure the search engine visible mode
In fact, when we install the WordPress program, we can see that there is a check box on whether the website search engine is visible or invisible, and it is visible by default. If we are not at ease, we can check the reopening settings in the background of the website to be visible to search engines.
Generally, when we lay out our website online, we may start to set the search engine to invisible mode, but when we officially operate the website, we must enable the search engine to be visible.
At the same time, we need to check whether the current WordPress website can simulate spider crawling successfully in mainstream search engines tools such as Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools. If the crawling is unsuccessful, we need to check the reason, whether it is a server problem or other website problems.
Third, join the webmaster tool platform
If we are a website, it is generally recommended to join the Google webmaster tool platform, and the website must be given priority to join the Google administrator tools.
The advantage of joining the tool platform is that you can monitor the data performance of the website in search engines at any time, including our timely submission of maps and website page articles, and it is still very useful to promote rapid indexing and analysis of page crawling.
Fourth, stable hosting providers
For beginners in building a website, we must be in the initial stage of building a website. Most beginners care about the cost of building a website to a minimum. But in fact, this kind of cognition is wrong.
Since we want to build a website, whether it is a personal website or a commercial enterprise website, the only thing we need to respect is the stability of the website.
It needs a certain degree of stability and speed efficiency, so when we choose a WordPress host, it is better to choose a mainstream host provider, such as Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and other mainstream businesses.
Fifth, cache plugins and server optimization
In the above, we mentioned the selection of excellent hosting providers, and we must choose excellent and stable businesses. However, like WordPress itself, there may be some weaknesses, that is, the size of the website is relatively large. If the caching mechanism and server optimization are not handled properly, the speed of the website may be reduced in the later stage of the website.
This is also the reason why many of our beginners feel slow when using WordPress. The further back you go, the more you feel that the speed of the server and website will become slower and slower. Based on this, we want to optimize the speed of the server website.
On WordPress, we generally install cache plugins and server components to improve the speed of the website. For the server, when we choose a stable and fast host provider, we also add a caching mechanism to the server. We will share which plugins and server optimizations to use later.
Sixth, choose a light theme that suits you
One of the advantages of WordPress is that merchants provide free theme templates and plugins, so many of us beginners may fall into a wrong whirlpool, changing a theme today and adding a few plugins tomorrow,
but in fact, these have no effect on our website at all. , when we choose the theme of the website, we try to choose a minimalist and simple style, so that the speed of our website will not be slowed down by the theme.
Because the main purpose of our website is not to show users how beautiful the website is but to show users the substantive content.
Seventh, start creating the first article
After we have everything ready above, we can start our first article. Personally, I think it is necessary to have a sense of ritual, and you must write your first article seriously.
For the content positioning, we do not require high-end and atmospheric academic articles but should be based on personal interests and fields of study.
In the first article, you can give yourself a preview of the preparation of the practice record website, and then you can slowly maintain and persist according to this direction.
Eighth, some security measures of the website
When many of us create personal websites, we do not know some basic technologies of the website and rely too much on the stability of the host provided by the service provider, so many people do not back up their websites.
Every year, the author sees that many people's websites lose data because they have no backup, making it impossible to restore the website data that I have been working hard to maintain and have achieved.
Therefore, when we install some security plug-ins on the server, or when the host company regularly backs up the website, we also need to update the WEB environment and website programs in a timely manner. After all, WP is still relatively safe, but we need to upgrade the program in a timely manner.
I hope that many of our individual webmasters will start their personal blogging journey after reading this article and choose WordPress to start building their own websites.
Building a website with WordPress is not so easy
Using WordPress as a website has many advantages, such as no need to know code, and no need to learn PHP programming; low cost and cheap renewal; open-source code, and often free updates; rich themes and plug-ins, which can be customized in the background, SEO friendly... There are still many advantages.
In this section, we will share with you some of the shortcomings of building a website with WordPress. This method of building a website is not necessarily as easy as you think. Students who are going to build a website with WordPress should have psychological preparation first.
First of all, it is recommended that you divide it into two steps before making a website
- The first step is the learning and trial stage: this stage is mainly to learn how to use WordPress and themes. In this process, you can freely modify the website with confidence. It doesn’t matter if it is broken. You can tear it down and redo it at any time. This period of time takes a long time, it is a process of learning and exploration.
- The second step is the official website construction stage: after mastering the use of the theme, build the website from scratch again, be careful when doing it, and avoid unnecessary waste and honor. This stage does not take long, because there is no need to explore anymore, and you have a good idea of where you want to change.
Don't do it while you learn, it puts a lot of pressure on yourself and is not good for the website itself, because there will be many detours in the learning phase, which will make the website redundant and prone to strange problems in the future.
The website in the learning stage can be tried and tossed casually; the official version of the website should be restrained from the beginning and tried as little as possible.
It takes a lot of time and energy to build a website because there are too many places to modify the background
Building a website with WordPress and paid themes saves a lot of time and effort than a "custom development website", but its threshold is definitely not low. Even if you want to build a simple website, you need to understand the theme operation logic (how to use it) before you can. (The official user manual of the theme is very long)
Our "WordPress Tutorial" is mainly used in the first stage (learning and trying stage), which can help students master the theme usage method faster. Although I bought a tutorial, I still need to invest a lot of time and energy to learn and explore. After learning, I will start building a website.
I don't think it's possible to get a website quickly without investing time and energy in learning to explore. Because every website, every host, and every theme has its own uniqueness that requires debugging. Every website has different needs.
WordPress business themes are powerful, and there are many places to modify them. For example, I have used a theme for many websites, but when I use it to make a new website, there are still some places that need to be found, and I have forgotten where to modify it. Because there are so many places to modify the website, we must not underestimate (the complexity of the theme).
Other
- When building a WordPress website, you often have to face English documents and English interfaces, so you must be mentally prepared.
- WordPress website building, it is best to have a useful ladder, because the themes and plug-ins are foreign, domestic access to foreign servers is not very stable, and often need help from the ladder.
- When building a WordPress site, it is best to have a foreign server (such as a SiteGround host). Domestic hosts are prone to compatibility problems. It is also because the network is blocked, resulting in an operation error. But the host in SG operates normally, this pot WordPress and themes do not back.
- SEO-friendly is not necessarily friendly. If you don't know SEO knowledge, the website built directly with WordPress may not be included and ranked well.
Summary: WordPress is like a camera and a lens, it is a tool, "the photo is good or not, the key is the head behind the lens". WordPress, hosting, themes, and plugins are all tools. Whether the website is good or not depends on the people who use these tools.
Don't step on those pits of WordPress building sites!
Some customers often ask us whether it is good to build a website with WordPress. In a responsible attitude, let's talk about WordPress.
01. Security Vulnerability
Without a doubt, the biggest disadvantage of WordPress is its security. WordPress is an open-source platform that relies heavily on custom plugins and website themes.
Plugins and themes are developed by different people and companies, and since no one oversees them, they can easily contain bugs or malicious code.
Apart from that, WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world and is hacked every day everywhere. In fact, according to a report, WordPress is the most hacked CMS platform in the world.
02. Expensive
Although WordPress itself is free, it comes at a high price overall, and WordPress has a lot of good plugins and themes for a fee.
If you want your website to stand out and you want your visitors to have a great user experience, you have to buy a theme because free themes are overused. Keeping your site up to date with new features can become prohibitively expensive with tons of new features being released all the time.
If you are a WordPress designer, the code can be tweaked by yourself. But most people don't know how to code, which requires companies to have a staff who can design and code.
Of course, most companies will not be equipped with such staff, otherwise, they would have developed and produced their own websites. If you want to save costs and choose WordPress, the result is more and more uneconomical.
03. Need to be updated frequently
WordPress updates are often only available for certain parts of certain themes or certain plugins, and the more plugins you use, the more likely you are to run into incompatibilities.
The entire WordPress maintenance process can be challenging, and you must be prepared to make adjustments to plugins and themes in order to have a functioning website.
If you don't have the budget or the relevant staff (design, programming), it's not easy to add new features and solutions can only be found on the WordPress forums.
04. Affects website SEO
WordPress is a search engine-friendly platform, but for people with little SEO experience and knowledge, WordPress can cause a lot of problems, one of which is WordPress’ category and tagging system.
If the content is over-labeled into multiple categories, Google will flag it as duplicate content, which will affect your website rankings.
05. Customization requires coding
If you want to personalize your website or enhance its design, to make changes to your website, you must have knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP, and you need to write a lot of complex code. If you try to make changes without professional knowledge, you can do a lot of damage to your website.
Therefore, when you choose which platform to use to build your website, you must fully understand its advantages and disadvantages before making a choice. Although it is famous, it may not be suitable for you at all.
Focus Leader uses the self-developed SaaS model cloud building and cloud marketing platform, which can avoid the above pits.
- In addition to being protected by the Focus Security Center 24 hours a day, the cloud platform is also protected by multiple defense systems, and the security level is very high;
- The leading cloud platform completely removes the coding mode, and can easily edit the background, and change the website design, structure, text, etc., without the need for technical knowledge and personnel;
- The leading cloud platform regularly updates and upgrades website functions every week. The website will not be out of date and is more suitable for foreign trade enterprises.
- The leading cloud platform has its own marketing function, which is friendly to the Google search engine and more conducive to SEO optimization...
FAQ: How do I create a professional WordPress blog?
Since the operation of this blog, many people have added to consult about the content of the website, and I have sorted out these problems in building a WordPress blog. You can take a look at the following frequently asked questions.
Can I build a blog site without using WordPress?
You can blog without WordPress, there are other blogging platforms besides WordPress. However, after comparison, WordPress is currently the best website builder in the field of blogging, and bloggers enjoy complete ownership and freedom.
Is it possible to build a WordPress blog without web hosting?
No, even less likely. A website's managed hosting (web hosting, server) is where the website's files and data are stored. All websites require the use of managed hosting (web hosting, server). Whether this managed host is your own or not.
Can I start a WordPress blog and make money with Google AdSense?
As long as you build your own blog with WordPress, you can integrate Google AdSense to make money, but the number of articles published is limited. Typically, posting 20 articles is enough.
At present, the blog already has the display function of Google ads, but considering the purity of the content, it does not use the advertising function. I hope that readers can click on the link in the article to purchase products to encourage webmasters to continue to output work content.
Can I start blogs in other foreign languages?
Yes, WordPress is a website builder that supports multiple language versions. You can choose your own blog language when you install WordPress, or click the settings page on the admin panel (ie the dashboard) at the back end of the WordPress blog site to choose your own language. WordPress has been translated into more than 56 languages, and some programs have also been translated into other languages. Many of the top WordPress themes and plugins are also available in multiple languages. Of course, you can also choose to translate these plugins and themes.
Can I build a WordPress blog site with no coding knowledge and skills?
Absolutely. You don't need any programming, coding, or design skills to create a professional-looking WordPress blog.
WordPress themes are easy to customize and personalize, all the user needs to do is click and set the website theme template. And themes like Astra already include several ready-made templates that you can import with one click and use right away.
And there are plenty of powerful themes like Divi that allow users to design web pages and personalize blog sites with drag-and-drop builds.
And there are other powerful drag-and-drop website builder plugins for designing web pages with ease, such as Beaver Builder and Elementor.
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