- By
When it comes to creating your first self-hosted WordPress website, Bluehost is one of the biggest names in the business – and likely one of the first hosting providers you’ll come across. They have an absolutely enormous customer base, their website — bluehost.com (note: discounts available) — is in the top 2000 most popular sites in the world, and WordPress.org lists them as an officially recommended hosting provider. So what’s involved when creating a fully-functional website with Bluehost in 2018? How do you get started?
Let’s take a look, step by step…
A step-by-step guide to creating a WordPress website with Bluehost:
– (note: video credits to Joe Casabona – creator of WordPress In A Month)
Video Transcript:
Bluehost is an affordable, reliable, professional, web hosting solution for WordPress. They offer one-click installs, a free domain name, automated backups, / support, and a -day money back guarantee. They are also an official WordPress-approved hosting provider. So if you’re looking for professional, dependable, affordable WordPress hosting, Bluehost is a solid bet. In this video, we’re going to set up our website using Bluehost and we’re going to do it with no steps skipped. So let’s get started. If you go to WinningWP.com/best-wordpress-hosting you will see their guide to choosing the best hosting for you. And if you scroll down to the Recommended Shared Hosting section, you’ll see a link to Bluehost, where you can get % off your first year. If you sign up for hosting through this link, WinningWP will get a small commission, but at no extra cost to you. These commissions help us to continue to create new content, like this. So, if we scroll there and then click “Bluehost”, we’ll be brought to a special offer for WordPress users. If we click “Get Started Now”, we’ll go through the sign up process. We’re going to choose the basic plan, which is $. per month. It allows us one website, gigabytes of space, unlimited bandwidth, a number of parked and sub domains, email accounts, and more. If you want to explore the other plans, like plus and prime, you’re given a lot more resources. You can get unlimited websites, unlimited space, unlimited email accounts, and more. So we’re going to click “select” under the basic plan and then we can choose to sign up with a domain name that we register through Bluehost for free or we can choose to sign up with an existing domain name. We’re going to sign up with a new domain name, and that domain is going to be “podcastmap”. In a previous video for WinningWP, we looked at the best way to figure out what domain name you should use. We also setup a number of guidelines and tools to find available domain names. After we type in our domain name we’re going to click “next” and then we’ll be brought to the registration page. You can see here that we can fill out the account information or we can use Google’s single sign on to create an account. We’re going to go through and fill out this information manually. Once we fill out that information we can go to the package information, where we can choose the package for our account plan. You’ll see that in order to get the $. per month deal, we’ll have to choose at least a month plan. When we do that, the setup fee is also waived and the primary domain registration is waived. We can also choose from a number of add-ons, like Domain Privacy Protection, which will hide our registration information or our domain from marketers. We can choose to get a backup plan, Search Engine Jumpstart, and SiteLock Security. For the purposes of this video we are going to turn all of these service off making the total amount for our plan $.. We’ll then put in our credit card information and click “submit”. Once our payment is submitted, Bluehost will present us with a few special offers that they have for us. We’re going to go ahead and click “no thanks” on these and then we’ll be brought to a page that allows us to create a password. Once we have our password and agree to the privacy policy and terms of service, we’ll click “next” and then our account will get created. Once our account’s created, we can click “login” and now we’re brought to the Bluehost onboarding process. Since we signed up specifically as a WordPress user, we are able to go through a more streamlined process for setting up our WordPress site. The first step is picking a theme that inspires us. I’m going to go ahead and pick Astra. With our theme selected, Bluehost is going to continue setting up WordPress for us. Once WordPress is set up, we can click “Start Building”. We also get a notice at the top of the screen saying that WordPress has been provisioned on a temporary domain. Because we just registered podcastmap.com, there’s going to be some time between when it was registered and when it’s ready. Luckily, Bluehost will update our site automatically when the domain is ready. You see that we have the familiar WordPress interface here with our Dashboard and our options down the left-hand side. But the first thing Bluehost does is ask us a series of questions to help us get set up. So we’re going to choose that we’re setting up a “Personal” site. We’ll put in the information for the site title and site description. We’ll click “Next Step”. And, then, it’s going to ask, “Are you going to update your site with news or blog posts?” The options will change based on what we select here, but since we’re setting up a blog, we’re going to click “Yes”. Then it’s going to ask us what users should see on the home page. Should they see the “Most recent news or updates” or “A static welcome page”? Again, because we’re setting up a blog, we’re going to choose the “Most recent news or updates”. Then Bluehost will ask us if we want to “Build a starter ‘Contact Us’ page”. That’s a great addition to this site, so we’re going to click “Yes”. We can also choose to connect our site to WordPress.com using Jetpack to do things like improve security, track stats, and grow traffic. Jetpack is a great tool and Bluehost is really helping us streamline the process of connecting it, so we’re going to go ahead and do that too. When we get back from authorizing Jetpack, you see we have our checklist and we can choose to customize our site. We’re not going to do that right now, so we’ll X this out, and then we’ll be brought to a WordPress Dashboard area. We can choose to X out, or dismiss, all of the boxes that we don’t need. And we’re going to go to the Bluehost area of the Dashboard. With your website now configured and ready to go on Bluehost, it’s time for you to add pages and content. Once you do that, as well as go through a few of the other steps here, like set up the navigation menus and customize the theme you chose, it’ll be time to launch your site. When you’re ready to launch your site, you can easily click the “Launch” button from the Bluehost area of the WordPress Dashboard. Once that happens, your site will be live and you’ll be ready to go. With our Bluehost site created, let’s go back to the Bluehost hosting area to see what other options Bluehost gives us. You can see from the Bluehost Dashboard that we can easily manage our new WordPress site and that we can enable other hosting options, like enabling G Suite for email, and we have a set of helpful links to do things like manage our database, use sFTP and SSH, and more. Thanks for watching this video. Be sure to click the Thumbs Up button and subscribe to WinningWP for more great content.
Anything to add?
Comments are closed.