WordPress is by far the best blogging platform available, powering over 35% of all websites on the net today. When you start a WordPress blog, you will be joining a community of bloggers who post a staggering 4.4 million blog posts a day. So it goes without saying that you want to configure your WordPress blog correctly to get you off on the right foot. To make sure your posts aren’t lost in a sea of almost five million other daily blog posts. It makes sense to learn how to start a WordPress blog.
Blogging Mistake Number 1 – Using a Free Blogging Platform
Choosing WordPress over a free blogging service such as Blogger is the first step to having a successful blog. You need an easy to use, full-featured page layout interface such as WordPress Gutenberg, which delivers in spades. And the best thing is that Gutenberg keeps getting better and better all the time. Gutenberg allows you to effortlessly divide your content up into blocks. The blocks are easy to set up on the fly and offer almost infinite design possibilities.
The first step in starting a successful WordPress blog is deciding on what your domain name will be. The domain name is your address on the internet, for example, www.example.com, with ‘example.com’ being the domain name.
Choose Any Domain Name Seller You Like
Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to get your domain name from one domain name provider or another. All website domain names of the same TLD (Top Level Domain) such as .com once purchased are registered on the same domain name registry. So, no domain reseller can claim to offer you a better quality domain. And seeing as all domain name resellers search the same registry before selling you a domain name, no one domain name reseller has a better selection of names than another. The playing field is completely level. Go where you feel comfortable.
New To Blogging – Keep It Simple
For a new blogger who wishes to avoid complexity and doesn’t wish to fiddle around setting up name servers with the domain name reseller. This is necessary as the Nameservers need to be redirected to point to the web hosting service provider and specific server, that your blog will reside on. For simplicity’s sake, it’s far easier to register your domain name with the hosting company that you will host your blog with.
In this case, the pointing and configuration of name servers will be seamless and done on the back end. Not to worry if you ever decide to leave one hosting company for another. You own the domain you can port it to any host you choose.
My Hosting Recommendation For Any New Blogger
For any new blogger wishing to use WordPress, I highly suggest that you use Bluehost. Bluehost is one of three hosts actually recommended by the team that writes the WordPress core. BlueHost hosting is cheap and provides you more than enough headroom to grow your blog. They also throw in a few important freebies like a free domain name when you signup. A free SSL (Secure Security Layer) certificate to digitally sign your website which will pass secure encrypted traffic between your user’s browsers and your blog’s server. Plus free 24/7 ticket-based support.
An added BlueHost benefit is that they offer a simple one-click WordPress Setup. That means you do not need to go manually set up WordPress. Then set-up the database that will hold your content and then tie the two together. The all-important wp-config.php file will be correctly set-up for your server configuration in the background.
Once you have signed up for WordPress, you simply enter your blog name and push the ‘Create New WordPress Site’ button on your Bluehost control panel and wait about five minutes while your new server builds your initial WordPress setup.
Save With My Discount Link
When you use my affiliate link, you will receive 60% off of the regular price of $8.99 and will only pay 3.95 a month. That’s less than the price of a latte per month!
For step-by-step guidance on how to sign up for Bluehost, including how to obtain a free domain name for your blog, see my article on How to Start a Blog.
Part One Initial WordPress Setup
Once you have signed up for hosting and hit the button to build your WordPress site. It’s now time to go about doing the all-important job of configuring the background settings, adding or choosing a theme, and loading all the plugins that are necessary to add functions to your WordPress site.
Basic WordPress Settings
The following 7 step guide will show you how to correctly configure your WordPress Site.
Total Time Needed :
30
Minutes
Total Cost:
$3.95
USD per month for website hosting
Required Tools:
Things Needed?
There are seven menu pages that you need to visit to configure your WordPress Blog. The steps below show you what entries to make on each of the menu pages.
Basic Steps to Configure Your WordPress Blog
Step 1
Type in your full domain name in a new browser tab. example.com
A screen saying ‘Hello World’ will appear
Log into your WordPress control Panel by typing /wp-admin after the domain name for example example.com/wp-admin
Step 2
Next, take a scan down the left-hand menu looking at all of the various menu options.
Click on ‘Settings’ -> ‘General’
– Enter your ‘Site Title’ this does not have to be your domain name unless you so choose. It could simply be ‘Example’ or whatever plain English name you would like to give your name that relates to your domain name
– Enter a site ‘Tagline’. Something like ‘The Best WordPress Blogger Ever’. A site tagline is still transmitted in the basic HTML code for the site to the browser and is picked up at part of the sites ‘<meta> data’ (describing the site and other background site functions) so it still has value for search engines even though most modern themes give you the option to not display the site tagline. For SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes you should enter a tagline.
– Check the box to ‘Anyone Can Register’ if you which to have people log in to leave site comments or to allow others to post on your site.
– If you have selected ‘Anyone Can Register’ make sure you have selected ‘Subscriber’ from the dropdown options. Not some higher-ranking level. If you accidentally select ‘Administrator’ that would give anyone from the internet the power to create a username, login, and steal data or do something malicious. Maybe even delete your whole website.
– Select the language you would like your site to be in.
– Select the timezone for your blog. Normally to make things easy set it to your timezone.
– Set the date and time format you prefer.
– Set the day of the week that a new week begins.
– Hit ‘Save Changes’ for your changes to be recorded
Step 3
In this step we will configure some basic ‘Writing settings’ for your blog.
– Click on the ‘Settings’ – Writing tab on the left menu
– Set ‘Default Post Category’. I suggest you leave this as Default. This enables you to set your post categories at a later time. Setting the ‘Post’ ‘Category’ can be set on the Posts page that you use to write and edit your blog posts. We’ll discuss setting up ‘Post’ ‘Categories’ at a later time.
– Default Post Format – leave this as standard. The standard settings should be fine for most bloggers.
– Post via email, unless you are sailing away to a remote location and wish to write posts as an email. Which will then be posted unformatted, uncategorized, and without images. There is no need to set-up this section. Leave it as is.
– Update Services – Leave as is. A common mistake is to add Google and other search engines that you wish to index your site here. Do not do it, it affects nothing. This is not the place for that.
– Hit ‘Save Changes’ to save any changes you have made.
Step 4
WordPress – Reading Settings
Under reading settings we are starting to set how your new blog site will look to your readers.
– Your Home Page Displays. Select ‘Your Latest Posts’ if you won’t have a front page for your blog and you would like your readers to be taken straight to a page showing excerpts along with their associated featured images as a summary of your latest posts in reverse chronological order.
Select ‘Static Page’ if you would like to have a home page and a separate blog page. You will need to create two pages one for ‘Home Page’ and the other for your ‘Blog Page’. Leave yourself a note to return to this page in the future after creating the relevant pages to set the pages for ‘Home Page’ and ‘Blog” page.
– Leave all the other settings as they are for now. You will want to come back in the future once your blog is up and running to fine-tune some of these settings to suit your preferences.
– IMPORTANT – Check the box ‘discourage search engines from indexing this site’. This is very important as you do not want Google and other search engines to crawl your site while it is under development and find no content. You also don’t want search engines to find ‘thin content’ which will be the case when you first start writing blog posts.
Remember once your blog is ready to go live that you will need to come back to this page and uncheck this box. This step is vitally important for Google and other search indexes to start crawling and indexing your blog pages, in order that they can be published on various Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
– Hit ‘Save Changes’ to save your changes
Step 5
– ‘Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post’ – Uncheck this box. This is a vulnerability in WordPress that is often exploited by spammers.
– ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts’ -Uncheck this box for the same reasons as above.
– ‘Allow people to submit comments on new posts – This is the global comments setting for WordPress. If you would like people to comment on your blog posts check this box. If not don’t check this box.
– ‘Other comment settings’ – Decide what’s best for your blog and modify the settings accordingly. I would suggest that if you will be allowing your readers to comment on your new blog that you set an expiry date far off in the future. Say one year. The other option is not to select the block at all, in which case the ability to comment will stay open forever.
– Continue modifying settings to match your preferences.
– ‘Email me whenever – Anyone posts a comment’ select this as you wish. make a note that you will need to configure your email settings or possibly use a plugin for email depending on your host. More about configuring your email in WordPress later.
– Once again modify settings as per your preferences. There is no need to fill in comment words to flag unless you so choose.
– Hit ‘Save Changes’ to save your changes
Step 6
There is no need to make any changes to the media settings at this point. For most Themes the default settings should be fine. If not please consult the knowledge base for the theme you will be using.
Step 7
Setting your permalinks correctly is essential to learn when you start a WordPress blog. Incorrectly setting your links may make migrating and updating the site difficult down the line. Incorrectly setting your permalinks may also have an effect on your blog’s google search engine rankings.
– I recommend that the only setting for ‘Permalink’ is ‘Post Name’. Select the radio button to ‘Post Name’
– Hit ‘Save Changes’ to save your changes
Congratulations you have just configured your first WordPress blog. Feel free to start playing with WordPress. WordPress is incredibly intuitive have a try. Remember ‘Pages’ are part of the permanent structure and appearance of your blog.
‘Posts’ are your blog posts. As you publish blog posts they will appear on your blog page.
Right now the next step for you is to go and create a ‘Home Page’ and a ‘Blog Page’. For the ‘Blog’ page, all you’ll need to do is create the page and save it. Once you have created these pages remember to go back to ‘Settings’ -> Reading settings.
If you skimmed through until this point and now you have a rough understanding of how to start a WordPress blog. The time has come to sign up for web hosting and start blogging.
If all of this looks just a little too intimidating. Which it really is not. I am offering a free fully configured WordPress sites for my followers.
Look out for my guide on writing using Gutenberg blocks coming out later this week.
I hope this short ‘Learn How To Start a WordPress Blog’ was useful. If you have any comments or would like to ask a question on setting up your WordPress blog, please feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
Welcome to the blogging community.
Hi, I’m Nic! Our Family of four have been out cruising since 2016. We have sailed about 15,000nm, almost halfway around the world. We sold everything, took the leap of faith, and bought a 10-year-old Lagoon 380 ex-charter catamaran. We’ve fixed every system on the boat, often more than once. Cruising has been such a wonderful, positive experience for our family that I want to share my tips to help you Become a Cruiser.
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