You want to start writing your own blog. Great idea. But how and where to start? There are many tutorials and tips on what you should do. It’s nice. But the tips themselves won’t show you exactly what you need to do to be online.
They will rather confuse and discourage you.
I promise that in this guide you will find a specific procedure on how to set up a blog via the WordPress platform. It will be easy and you will manage it, even if you have never done anything like it before.
I was also a complete beginner four years ago, when I founded my very first blog tajomstvaretoriky.sk with a friend. We didn’t know anything about it, he looked awful (he still looks like D, because we don’t pay attention to him anymore).
Now I have a lot more experience, on one blog, which I do only a little bit, I now have over 15,000 visits a month. At work, where I now write blog articles, I increased traffic from Google by 1063% in 18 months. At the beginning of 2019, I founded the fitnessrevolution.sk blog via WordPress and in a few months I had thousands of visits. I’m no guru, but I know enough and I have more than the basics.
Maybe you want to start writing about what you enjoy, or you want to start making some money by bloggingYou may even want to have your own business. Whatever your goal, you can achieve it very quickly with this guide. After reading it, you will have the creation of a blog at your fingertips.
To create a blog via WordPress, you only need these 3 things:
- Domain
- Hosting for WordPress
- WordPress šablón u
Before we look at these 3 things in more detail, let’s talk about why I think it’s most worthwhile to choose the WordPress platform for blogging.
Why WordPress is a great choice when you want to start a blog
There are many ways to create a blog. Since blogging has become popular not only in the world, but also in Slovakia, several dozen platforms have emerged where you can start writing articles in minutes.
But I do not recommend them, especially not free solutions. Although I haven’t tried them all, in the cases I’ve tried, you’re pretty limited by the options that the platforms offer you. The look of the site is often fixed and you won’t change it much, except for the colors. Many features are only available after you upgrade to the paid version. Worst of all, you often have a platform ad on your site, and you can only remove it after you have guessed that you have switched to the paid version.
In contrast, the WordPress platform (beware, not wordpress.com) is free. You only pay for hosting and your domain. In addition, it has many other features that you can add using WordPress plugins.
Other platforms (eg Drupal, Joomla, Blogger, Tumblr, Medium.com…) don’t catch on to him at all in terms of number of users.
On WordPress operates 28.9% of the world’s website and has a 50-60% market share in CMS systems (CMS = web content management system). But popular does not always mean the best. It also has other advantages:
- It is very easy to install and run (you can find the procedure at the end of the article)
- It has many nice šablón for free and affordable for tens of euros, so your site can look like a professional programmer
- WordPress has a large community of people and is regularly upgraded
- You can easily optimize it for Google search
- Readers can easily share your articles
- You can learn to use it relatively quickly
- You don’t need to know how to program and you can add a lot of functions thanks to WordPress plugins
Choosing the right domain
A domain is, simply put, the internet address of your blog (website). For example, this site has the domain wp.com, similarly Google has the domain google.com. Nothing complicated, is it?
All you need to do is come up with a domain name for your own blog. You need 2 things to do that. Choose a domain name and suffix.
Domain name
The domain name can be identical to the name of your blog or your brand. But this is not a condition. It can also be your name. It is important that the name is free when verifying the domain.
Domain suffix
Domain suffix (TLD) can be generic (eg .com, .org, .net), national (.sk, .eu, .cz, .asia…) or you can use new domain suffixes (.blog, .academy…) . In the past, you had only a few generic and national choices. Thanks to the new endings, the number of which increases from year to year, you have the opportunity to really play with your domain name.
If you want to operate in one country, it is better to use the national suffix of that country. If you want to operate worldwide, it is best to choose a generic domain such as .com.
The prices of most domains are usually around 10-15 euros per year:
- .sk domain you will find from 7.90 euros per year
- .com domain can be found from 9.95 euros per year
You can buy a domain very easily through a domain registrar, you just need to check the availability of the domain and if it is free, the registrar will register it for you and you will be its holder for a prepaid period. The registrar is often a direct company that also offers hosting.
Choosing hosting for your blog
If you already have a domain, you will need hosting on which your blog will be stored. Hosting is a space on a server that you rent and is constantly connected online, so it will be available not only to you but also to your readers.
Personally, I have experience with two hosting companies, with which I also have a few domains:
Both also have direct hosting for WordPress.
The advantage is that you can easily install WordPress hosting with one click via the hosting control panel (Webpanel in Websupport or WY Panel in Webglobe – Yegon).
Whatever hosting provider you choose, you should consider the following 4 things when choosing:
- Hosting availability – means the percentage of time your site is online. The bigger the number, the better. Ideally, it should be at least 99.98%.
- The price – the cheapest solution is not always the best. You’ll also find hosting for less than a euro a month, but I’d avoid that. You also need to look at how much space your blog will need. (E.g. you do not need unlimited hosting. You will not use more than 1GB of space for a regular blog.
- Web loading speed – It is affected by several factors and one of them is hosting. Although you will find several comparisons of hosting speeds, the truth is that you can never be sure of the loading speed until you get the site up and running.
- Support – No matter how much experience you have, there can always be something you can’t handle. You will need to restore the site backup, fix the broken mail or something else. Technical support should help you do just that.
Selection of WordPress šablóny
Finally, there is the last step, and that is the selection šablóny . You can think of a template as a predefined look for your site, to which you then just add content or, in the case of a blog, your article.
If you are just getting started with blogging, all you need is šablóna free one from the official wordpress.org website. You have several thousand to choose from. The only downside to the look is that you will only be able to change what the predefined šablóny options allow.
If you would like to have a really nice šablón , I recommend investing a few tens of euros in paid šablóny at themeforest.net .
For connoisseurs who would like (almost complete) control over the look of their WordPress blog, I recommend šablón at Divi . It is the most used šablóna in the world (currently more than 400,000 users), which allows you to have the look of your blog according to your ideas.
You can try it at this link elegantthemesdemo.com .
The last step – connecting your blog
Fortunately for you, installing WordPress is very easy. All large hosting providers also have a one-click automatic installation of WordPress in the hosting administration interface. Just choose your login name, email and password, through which you will log in to WordPress and the automatic installation will do everything for you.
Let’s show it with the example of hosting in Webglobe – Yegon . After purchasing the domain and hosting, just log in to your WY Panel show.
Go to the CMS installer section and select WordPress.
Then just choose a login name, password, email and click the Save button. Leave the installation destination path (subdomain and directory) blank. The system will do everything automatically for you.
After installation, you can get to WordPress by typing in the browser /wp-login.php for your domain, ie you will type in the browser, for example, yourdomain.sk/wp-login.php.
After logging in, go to the Appearance – Themes section and click Add New .
You will now have a choice of 2 options depending on whether you have free or paid šablón . If you have bought a paid one, click on the button Upload a topic. If you found one freely available on wordpress.org, just type its name in the field Search for topics.
In the first case, just select the purchased šablón on your computer and click Install Now .
In the second case, just hover your mouse over the topic and click the blue Install button.
And it is. You now have your own blog in the most used WordPress blogging platform. You can start writing. Go to the Articles – Add New section where you can start working on your first blog.
I wish you a lot of fun creating your blog and writing your first articles.
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