How to Make a Website in 2021 – Step by Step Optimum Guide
Do you want to build your own website but are not sure where to start? You have come to the right place and we are writing this all to guide you through making it step after another.
People who don’t have a technical background still think they can never build their own websites. But the truth is, it isn’t very hard. There are various platforms on the world wide web where you can start off, even without coding knowledge or being tech-savvy.
As you have been wondering where to start, start with us for free! We compiled all the relevant information in one place to save you from all the research and hassle you would have to go through to make a website. This is our comprehensive guide on building your own website in just one day! Read and follow the steps in the guide and you will see how it is being very easy!
What you’ll achieve
Here is an overview of what you will achieve from this guide:
- Finding and registering a free domain
- Selecting a hosting platform
- Installing WordPress
- Adding a template to your website
- Creating web pages with WordPress
- Add plugins to customize your WordPress website
What you’ll need to start off
- You’ll need a domain name – this is simply the name of your website. For instance, facebook.com is a domain name.
- You’ll also need web hosting -this is the place where the files of your website will be saved.
Before you start
When you’re ready to start, you will see a few hundred platforms and website builders on the market. Few names such as WordPress, Wix, Joomla, SquareSpace, Drupal, … etc.
The question is, which one should you pick and why? To help you determine the correct choice, take a look at this chart based on recent statistics made by BuiltWith
Now you can see or at least have a solid idea about which platform you should pick from the most popular website builders or content management systems (CMS).
- WordPress 53%
- Wix 8%
- Joomla 5%
- Progress Sitefinity 5%
- Squarespace 4%
We personally love self-hosted WordPress because of its easy-to-use tools, a vast variety of plugins, themes, and extensions to choose from! The best part is WordPress is a free platform!
Huge brands like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and BBC America use WordPress. WordPress’s market share as of 2019 statistics is 35%! This means WordPress powers 35% of websites on the internet.
Below are the steps for you to follow to make a WordPress website on your own. Follow the guidelines attentively, and we are sure you won’t mess up!
Step 1: Get started
We highly recommend that you select WordPress. It is not only free but also offers thousands of functions, plugins, and designs to customize your website according to your needs. You can create any kind of website you imagine, without any hidden charges or restrictions. Create the one you have been dreaming of, the sky’s the limit! Let’s start!
1. Buy a domain name
The first thing to start with is your domain name. The domain name is the address of your website that visitors will use to find your website on the internet.
Cost: A domain name usually costs $14.99/year. But you can get it for FREE when you follow our guide.
2. Find a hosting provider
The other thing you would need to start is hosting. Hosting is basically the place (server) where your website stays and is stored. Hosting typically costs around $7.99/month!
You will find thousands of hosting providers offering different price ranges and plans around the market and to make it easy for you, we have some recommendations based on your website size and the traffic you’re expecting to get to your website.
- Bluehost
Starting at $7.99 for hosting 1 website with only 50 GB SSD Storage and FREE domain name.
- Bluehost
- Hostgator
Starting at $5.95 for hosting 1 WordPress website for 100K visits per month and FREE domain included if you subscribe for 12, 24, or 36 months.
- Hostgator
- WPEngine
We recommend WPEngine for large scale websites that have a huge number of visits per month. They have a high-end technical support for WordPress and they will help you to solve any issue with your website in minutes.
Starting at $35 for a small website or blog that has up to 25000 visits per month with 10GB of local storage.
3. Get your website ready
We are going to create a self-managed WordPress website on Bluehost shared server and here is the process you will go through step by step to make your website:
Go to the Bluehost website and click on the big green ‘Get Started Now’ button.
Now select the best plan you think will suit your needs and proceed to the next step. Quick tip, Basic and Plus are the popular picks. You can pick the Basic one to keep your cost down.
On the next screen, you will be asked to choose a domain name. You will have 2 options there, to create a new domain or use a domain you already own (if you already bought your domain from another registrar). Proceed to the next step by clicking on the Next button or if you are still hesitant about your domain, click on the link at the bottom “I’ll create my domain later”.
Next, you will now land on a screen where you will be given purchasing options and add in your payment details to make the purchase. You will have the option to buy your hosting plan for 12, 24, or 36 months. The longer-term you pick, the more saves you make.
Good work! You’re almost done with your first step! After this, you will receive an email including more details about how to control the panel of your web hosting (cPanel). Once you log in, you will land on your very own hosting dashboard. From there you can install WordPress!
Step 2: WordPress Installation
Now for the installation of the real thing, WordPress! On the website panel, choose the WordPress icon.
You will land on a screen showing you Bluehost Marketplace Quick Install for WordPress. Click the ‘Get Started’ button to proceed.
Next, choose your domain from the drop-down menu, where you want to install WordPress. Click next to go to the next step.
Next up, enter your website and admin username, a suitable password for your website, and check all the empty boxes that show on the screen. After this, click on the ‘install’ button to proceed.
The installation will start right away, all you need to do now is wait! Once it’s done, you’ll receive a success notification at the top of the screen.
Now click on ‘Installation Complete’, and you’ll land on a screen with your WordPress login URL and password!
And finally! You have created your first WordPress website! Go to the WP login page. Log in to it using the same admin username and password you set up earlier.
Now what’s left is the design of your website, let’s get creative!
Step 3: WordPress Theme Selection
A WordPress theme is responsible for the appearance (front-end) of your website. There are thousands of themes you can choose from or you can also stick with the basic one.
You have 2 options to go with when it comes to WordPress theme selection. Free theme from WordPress marketplace or a premium paid theme from Themeforest marketplace.
A premium theme costs between $45 and $60 per single license.
If you want to change your theme, go to the WordPress admin dashboard, Visit appearance >> Themes page and then click the ‘Add New’ button.
Free Themes (No Cost)
When you land on the next page, you can scroll through the available themes and select one that you like. Install the theme you have selected by clicking the ‘Install’ button.
Premium Themes ($45 – $65)
To install a purchased premium theme, from adding a new theme page, click on the “Upload Theme” button at the top of your page and follow the process to upload and activate your theme.
Customize Your Theme
To customize the installed theme, go to Appearance > Customize from your WordPress admin dashboard.
This is where the cool part comes in when you click the customize link, you will land on a theme customizer page, where you can play with the theme settings all with a live preview of your website. You can set your site identity and colors here, and upload your logo beside more options depending on your installed theme.
Step 4: Adding Your Contents
To start adding your content to your website, you need to know 3 things that control your website content:
Pages
Pages are almost always static content that is not going to be changed frequently. Like your about, contacts, FAQs, and so on.
To add a new page, go to “Pages > Add New” or “Pages > All Pages” and then click the “Add New” button.
This will open a new screen where you will manage your page title and contents of that page. Give your page a title and start writing your page contents.
After adding your page contents, click on “Publish” on the top right side of your screen to publish your page and make it available to your website visitors.
That’s it, now you have the first page of your website published and you can see if by clicking on the page URL “Permalink” below the page title (you can also change this URL to whatever you want).
Posts (Blog)
Posts are the dynamic content of your website. You’re adding posts and articles to your website periodically to keep your visitors up to date.
Navigation (Menu)
The menu is the element that links your pages together to make it easy for your website visitors to move between your pages and browse your website easily.
After adding all pages to your website, from your WordPress dashboard, go to “Appearance > Menus”, add a name to your menu, and then click “Create Menu” button to start adding menu items (links) to your menu.
Now, your menu is ready to start adding links to the pages you select to appear on that menu. Just select the pages from the left side widget and click “Add to Menu” button, then save your menu by clicking “Save Menu” button on the right side widget as you see in the screenshot.
Congratulations! Your website is ready now and your pages and navigations have been published successfully. Now it is time to start making some settings.
Step 5: Customizations
Once you are ready with your content, you can customize it with the amazing options on WordPress.
Set up your default homepage
To set up a static front page, you need to go to “Settings > Reading” page. Click on the static front page under the “Front page displays” option. Then choose the pages you prepared earlier for home and blog pages.
Now, WordPress will show the ‘Home’ page as the landing page age of your website and “Blog” page to showcase your blog post.
Update your website title and tagline
You can also change the title and tagline of your website anytime by going to “Settings > General” page and update them from there and click “Save”.
Step 5: Installing Plugins
Plugins in WordPress are like extra extensions. They are adding more features and capabilities to your WordPress website.
If your website is ready to publish but you think it still needs some additions to make, use plugins. There are almost 49,000 free WordPress plugins to choose from based on your needs.
Recommended Plugins
For any WordPress website, we recommend installing some core and very important plugins to any website to protect and speed up your website.
- WP Super Cache Plugin
This plugin helps you to improve your website loading speed by serving cached pages to your website visitors for a better browsing experience. - iTheme
iTheme WordPress plugin is one of the best plugins to help you secure and protect your WordPress website from being hacked. - Updraft Plus
Installing this plugin will help you create and schedule automatic backups of your WordPress website and save them to your cloud storage or send them by email - Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO plugin helps you improve your WordPress website SEO to get more organic traffic from search engines. - Contact Form 7
If you want to add forms to your website, this is one of the best WordPress plugins to do the job for you. - Google Site Kit
This is the official WordPress plugin from Google that will add insights to your website about how people find and use your website.
Now, you’re done! You have created your first WordPress website and it is ready for use.
The next task for you is to submit your website to search engines to get indexed. Subscribe to our newsletter to see how you can do that when we publish our next article.