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WordPress provides an incredibly powerful way for just about anyone to make their own website. In this video, we’ll show you exactly how — step by step — to make a high-quality WordPress website using best practices in just 15 minutes! Simply follow along, do the same as shown in the video, and you should have your own website up and running in no time (in literally less than just 15 minutes)!
Let’s get started…
How to Make a WordPress Website in 15 Minutes or Less
Direct link to watch the video over on Vimeo.
– (note: video credits to Joe Casabona – creator of Creator Courses)
Video Transcript:
WordPress is not only the most popular CMS on the planet, but it’s also touted as one of the easiest platforms to get up and running quickly. In this video we’re going to show you that you can quickly, easily, and correctly create a nice-looking WordPress website. We’re going to cover a lot of the foundational stuff to set up a WordPress site in just minutes including signing up for hosting, registering for a domain, installing WordPress, installing and configuring a theme, and installing and configuring plugins. All of these things are necessary and we’re going to show you how to do them right now, starting with signing up for hosting. If you go to WinningWP.com, you’ll find a fantastic guide on how to choose the best hosting for you. We’re going to use SiteGround for this video because it’s the best hosting for most people and it includes some WordPress goodies as well. By clicking on this link, we do use an affiliate link, but this does not affect the cost for you and we get a small commission to help create more great content like this. Once we get to the SiteGround website, we can choose a plan. There are three different plans to choose from, but since we’re setting up one website we’ll use the startup plan which is $. per month. That’s % off the regular price. The first thing we need to do is enter our domain. We can register a completely new one or transfer one that we’ve already purchased. We have not purchased a domain yet so we’re gonna put that in here. We’ve already done the legwork to figure out what domain we want to use, but some good tips are to try to get a .com domain because those are the most common and most often remembered, try to use some keywords based on the topic of your blog, and try to make it as short as possible. We’re going with BestDeskSetup.com. Once we put in the domain, we’ll click Proceed, SiteGround will double check to make sure that domain’s available for registration, and then we can create our hosting account. We’ll put in all the requisite information and then we’ll submit the form. We’ll review what we’re purchasing, which is the Startup hosting service, we’ll purchase it for a period of months to get the promo, and we’re also going to get the domain registration. There are also a couple of extras that are checked off by default that we’re going to uncheck. However, it’s up to you to determine if you want these things. Something like domain privacy will prevent cold emails and calls from coming to you once you register the domain, but we don’t need that for domain registration. We will review the price, we’ll make sure we’ve confirmed everything we need to confirm, and then we’ll pay. Once our order is submitted our account will be created. Then, we’ll proceed to the Customer area. Because we have a brand new account SiteGround is going to ask us to set up our new hosting account. We want to “Start a new website” and we want to install WordPress. The Admin email will be the one that we use to register our account with, the Username will be one that we can choose, and our Password. We’ll then click Confirm. We’ll skip the Enhancements and we will complete the setup. Our hosting account is now ready to use so we’re going to proceed to the Customer area. Here we’re presented with current promotions for SiteGround, but we’re going to click My Accounts. You’ll notice that we’ve got some information about our account, BestDeskSetup.com as well as the domain. Now, there’s one thing that we need to make note of here and that is since when you register a domain you need to verify it. So, we’re going to go to our email where we will click to approve the domain. We’ll verify the information is correct and now our domain is verified. It still may take some time for the domain to propagate, but usually that’s done pretty quickly with new domains. Along with the verification email, you’ll get a few other emails confirming your account, sending you important links that you’ll need to know about, and more. With WordPress installed, we’re going to do one more thing before we actually hit the WordPress Admin. We’re going to go to SiteGround’s cPanel. We’re going to be asked if or this should be accessed securely, which we would like to do, and now we’re at SiteGround’s cPanel. The cPanel is some place where we can manage our entire hosting account and we’re given access to a great number of tools to help enhance and manage our website. We’re looking for a way to make our domain secure and we can do that with Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt will allow us to generate a free SSL certificate for our domain. SSL certificates allow us to send information from our website securely and encrypted. That way if we’re sending sensitive information like passwords or payment information, that information can’t get stolen. Google has been prioritizing websites with SSL certificates installed. We’re going to take advantage of the fact that we can do that for free with Let’s Encrypt. We’re also going to use a Let’s Encrypt wild card SSL. The Let’s Encrypt wildcard SSL allows us to use the certificate not only for our top-level domain, BestDeskSetup.com, but also subdomains, which includes www.BestDeskSetup.com We’ll go ahead and install that now. And once the process is complete, we will have successfully installed SSL on our new website. Now, it’s time to go to the WordPress Admin panel. We’ll click My Accounts to get back to our account overview area and we’ll click Go to Admin Panel, the green button next to our WordPress install. We’re going to put in the username and password that we chose at installation and now we have a working WordPress website. If we visit the front end, you’ll see that we have the default WordPress theme and some default content that SiteGround has installed for us, but it’s time to start customizing our website. The first thing we want to do here is choose a theme. So what we’ll do is, we’ll go to Appearance → Themes and we’ll click Add New Theme. WordPress has thousands of themes to choose from so choosing a theme could be a long and daunting task. It’s up to you to determine what important features you want and find some good sources for both free and paid themes. We go over the differences between free and paid themes in another video and we’ve already gone ahead and chosen the theme that we want for this website. The name of that theme is called Tiny Hestia and we’re going to search for it here right in the Dashboard and then Install it. Once it’s installed, we can Activate it and once we activate it, this particular theme prompts us to get started, so it’ll take us through everything this theme has to offer. So, the first thing we’ll do is go to Recommended Actions. It recommends that we install a couple of companion plugins to go along with our theme. We’ll opt to install and activate Orbit Fox Companion, but we’re not going to install Pirate Forms. We have a different form plugin in mind for that. It also tells us about some useful plugins this theme is optimized for, but again we’re going to skip over these for now. What we’re going to do is go to Customize under Appearance. With the Customizer, we can make some changes to really make this site our own. First, we’re going to change the site title to Best Desk Setup and change the tagline to “Your # Place for Great Office Ideas. We can also choose to upload a logo if we had one. We’ll take a quick look at Appearance → Settings where we can change how we want our sidebars for our pages and our blogs to be laid out, if we want to enable sharing icons, and scroll to the top. We can also choose the typography. Again, this is another task that can take quite a long time if you really want to find the look and feel of your blog. We’re not going to go through this now, but one of the reasons we chose this theme is because it gives us that flexibility. The theme also has header options, colors, and more in order for us to fully customize this theme and make it ours. Because of the limited time we have here, we’re not going to go through all of these options, but we strongly recommend you take a look at this and really customize the theme to make it your own. With the changes we did make, we’re going to click Publish. The last thing we’re going to do is talk about plugins. Aside from the Orbit Fox Companion plugin that we just installed giving us more features for our theme, SiteGround comes with Jetpack installed by default. This is a great feature-packed plugin that gives you simple security, customizations, management, and more. The last thing we’ll do in this video is set up Jetpack so that it’s ready for you to use. So we’ll click on the big, green, Set up Jetpack button and that will take us to WordPress.com, so we’re going to login with our WordPress.com account. If you don’t already have a WordPress.com account, you can create one for free and then our connection to our new website will be authorized. Connecting Jetpack to WordPress.com gives us access to even more features like statistics and analytics. We’ll be prompted to check out the Premium options for Jetpack, however we can use Jetpack completely for free if we click on the Start with Free button. We’ll then be brought back to our Dashboard where we can click on Activate Recommended Features. The reason that we chose Jetpack was because as a single plugin it does the work of many different plugins. It has a wide array of features that are very useful to our WordPress site, especially our blog. This includes the ability to speed up our site by using CDNs for our images, Lazy Loading images, enabling or disabling special Custom Content types, and a lot more. Jetpack even includes contact form functionality by default, so you can quickly and easily create a contact form. With Jetpack installed and configured, we now have a fully functioning website that people can start to visit, but of course we’re not all the way there yet. There still may be more plugins that you want to install and configure, like Yoast SEO to improve the search engine optimization of your site. You’re going to need to write some content, like your first few blog posts, and a couple of pages for visitors to know who you are and how to get in touch. But in less than minutes, we have installed and configured a WordPress site. That’s it for this video. If you liked it, be sure to click the thumbs up down below and subscribe to WinningWP for more great content.
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