How to Host Your Own Website With Bluehost
If you’re looking to launch a new website or need to refresh an existing site, you’ve probably considered the various options available. With so many different platforms offering completely free hosting to aspiring bloggers, it can be hard to know which one is the best for your needs. Don’t worry – we’ve been there, and we’re going to tell you exactly what we did to create a fully-functional blog that brings in the traffic.
Step 1: Choose A Hosting Plan
One of the first things you need to do is choose a hosting plan. Bluehost is one of the most popular, and arguably the best, web hosts available. When you sign up for a free account with Bluehost, you’ll notice that you can instantly launch a custom-built blog from scratch. This blog won’t just provide you with an online space to write your thoughts – it will be fully-functional and able to bring in the traffic!
The best part is that Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans that you can choose from. If you’re looking for a free option, they offer the basic shared hosting that will host 1 website. If you’re looking for a more professional looking site, they have a premium hosting plan that will host unlimited sites. For those who need a little extra space, they even offer a DEDICATED PLAN that will host a single site along with a few other websites
Step 2: Choose A Domain Name
It’s important to choose a unique and relevant domain name for your website. If you’re new to web design, this may be a task that seems daunting. However, as you take the time to explore different domain name ideas, you’ll notice that you’ll come across some truly excellent domain names that you can purchase for a fraction of the cost that your first choice would have cost you. If you don’t own a domain name yet, this is a crucial step to take before you start building your site. If you do already own a domain name, this step is merely to ensure that it is correctly attributed to your brand.
Step 3: Install WordPress
WordPress is the world’s #2 content management system (CMS) used by 27.8% of all websites worldwide. This is largely thanks to its robust feature set and simple yet intuitive design. It is highly-recommended by bloggers and businesses worldwide for its simplicity and usability. To get started, visit https://wordpress.com/ and click on the big blue button that starts the install process. This will take you to a screen that will guide you through the setup process. Once setup is complete, you can log in to your newly-installed WordPress and begin creating content. This content can then be published to your site and utilized in a number of different ways, including adding more posts to your blog.
Step 4: Install A Larger WordPress Theme
WordPress themes are the skin sets of blogs and websites that are built on the WordPress platform. They can range in size from tiny to large and can be used to completely change the look and feel of your site. If you’re looking to create a more sophisticated-looking site, you may want to consider using a larger WordPress theme that comes with an unlimited number of columns and rows of content. Keep in mind that larger themes can impact your site’s loading time and might not be ideal for sites that are trying to maintain a slim and fast loading time.
Step 5: Integrate Social Media
If you have a social media account for your business or brand, you can easily integrate this into your website. This way, you can have your existing social media accounts (if you choose to integrate them) work on your site, engaging with your audience and expanding your reach. Some of the services that you can integrate with WordPress include Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you don’t have a social media account yet, you can easily set up a profile with any of the services mentioned above to have a presence on these platforms. Doing so will allow you to engage with your audience and showcase your expertise – perhaps even landing you some new customers along the way!
Step 6: Install And Configure Compression
To increase the performance of your site and save on bandwidth, you may want to consider installing and configuring some form of content compression. Your host will advise you on what type of compression is best suited for your site, and how to use it. If you’re looking for a free option, you can use GZIP compression, which is commonly used by WordPress. Using this type of compression can reduce the size of your site’s page files by half, resulting in faster page loads and more functionality for your visitors. You should always try to choose a compression type and configure it for your site — opting for the proper compression settings can result in significant improvements to your site’s load time and performance.
Step 7: Optimize The Permalink Structure
When someone visits your site, they will probably navigate to one (or more) of your blog posts. To ensure that these posts are easily discoverable, you may want to consider changing the way that your blog posts are linked to. WordPress allows you to easily change the structure of your permalinks – the unique set of strings of characters (e.g., http://yourblog.com/category/my-post-title) that are used to reference your posts in online contexts (e.g., social media platforms, email signatures, and more).
If you want to use a shorter version of your post’s title, you can do so by appending the -short to the end of your post’s title. For example, if your post title is My Awesome Blog Post, you can make it easier for someone to find by changing the permalink structure to: My Awesome Blog Post.
If you don’t want to use a shorter version of your post’s title, you can leave it as it is and just make sure that your post’s content contains the words “my”, “awesome”, and “post”, so that it’s easy for someone to find a relevant blog post when searching for content pertaining to your topic.
Step 8: Install More Plugins
Plugins are resources that can enhance your site’s functionality or performance. There are countless plugins available on WordPress.org that can be used to improve the appearance, performance, and overall user experience of your site. Some of the more popular ones are: