Free Website Hosting with WordPress – Tips & Tricks
A free website hosting offering from Bluehost, one of the most popular hosting platforms, lets you create a professional-looking website without needing to know any coding skills. The best part? You get to enjoy this free service for as long as you want.
Whether you’re just testing the waters with a simple blog or you want to create a full-fledged eCommerce store, this hosting solution will assist you in every step of the way. And if you ever decide to switch to a premium account, you can continue enjoying all the perks that come with it for as long as you want.
So, let’s take a look at how to create a free website with WordPress.
Install WordPress
WordPress is the world’s #1 content management system and probably the most popular CMS among all the different types of websites. Meaning that it’s a platform that you can use to power your blog or website. It was originally designed for blogging, but nowadays it can be used to manage a large number of content-rich websites.
You can download WordPress from the WordPress.org website and install it on your own domain. However, for the purpose of this article, we will use Bluehost’s WordPress-enabled hosting service.
This service, which we’ll discuss in more detail below, is probably one of the best bargains available in the industry. Not only do you get to enjoy a full suite of WordPress-related services for free, but you also get to enjoy a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 support via email. Sounds like a no-brainer to us!
Create a Free Blog Using WordPress
Bluehost’s WordPress-enabled hosting service is completely free, so you have no payment options to worry about. For this reason, we recommend them to all the readers of this article. Not only do they offer some of the best deals in the industry, but they also make it really easy to get started.
To create a free blog with WordPress using Bluehost, simply visit their site and click on the Get Started button. Alternatively, you can also click on the blue Get Started button on their main dashboard to get started immediately.
From there, you will be brought to their blog hosting service, where you can select the plan that best suits you. For the purpose of this article, we will use the Classic plan.
Once you have selected this plan, click on the blue Continue button to continue to their shared hosting dashboard. Once on this page, you can click on the Create New Blog button to get started creating your blog right away. A window will pop up where you can enter a name for your blog, along with a short description about what it is that you will be blogging about.
Entering a name for your blog is really important, as it will be the unique identifier for your blog through Stitcher, your RSS aggregator. Having a unique identifier will make it really easy to find your content when you post new entries. After you’ve entered a unique name for your blog, continue filling in the remaining fields with the details about what you will be blogging about.
There are four different types of blogs that you can create with WordPress. Each of these types of blogs will have its perks, but if you’re just getting started, go with the Classic plan, as it’s one of the easiest to use and understand.
Customize Your Blog Through Appearance
WordPress offers a lot of different customization options through the Appearance tab of your dashboard. This tab allows you to change the way your blog looks with a few clicks of a button. Changing your blog’s appearance is really easy and can be done through a few different methods, such as changing the colors, adding a header image, and adding a footer.
To add a header image to your blog, simply click on the Settings tab within the Appearance section of your WordPress dashboard. Here you can add a photo to appear on the top of your blog’s pages. To add a footer, simply click on theSettings tab in the Appearance section of your WordPress dashboard. Here you can add text that will appear at the bottom of every page on your site. Once you have added a header image and footer to your blog, simply click on the preview button to see how it looks.
Now that you’ve got your blog set up and fully functional, it’s time to take a look at some of the tools that WordPress has to offer.
Connect To Twitter
Within the WordPress dashboard, you will see a number of icons located along the top bar. This is where you can connect your blog to various platforms and tools that can help drive traffic to your site. In this case, we will use the Twitter icon to connect our blog to the Twitter platform.
Once you have connected your blog to Twitter, you will be able to engage with your audience and share content through tweets.
Twitter is a social media platform that was first developed for sharing short status updates or “tweets.” Its most popular feature is the ability to follow and engage with multiple users at once. This makes it easier for you to keep up with what everyone is saying without having to visit each individual profile page.
If you’re looking to grow your blog’s audience, you can use Twitter’s various tools to find and engage with people interested in your niche. You can use Twitter lists to follow all the people, companies, and organizations that you deem to be important to your niche. You can use hashtags to find and follow the conversations regarding your blog’s topic on Twitter.
Now that you’ve got your blog up and running, it’s time to take a look at some of the tools that WordPress has to offer. These are the tools that you can use to grow your blog and connect with other content creators, like yourself.
Useful WordPress Tools
WordPress has a lot of incredibly helpful tools that you can use to make your blog or website better. A few of these tools are listed below.
WP-Spamcheck
With the rise of content farms and the prevalence of spam blogs and comments flooding the web, it wasn’t long before people started looking for ways to combat this issue. One of the simplest and most effective ways to do this is through the use of a spam checker tool. WordPress includes a built-in spam checker that crawls through your blog and detects spam comments.
One of the best spam checker tools out there is WP-Spamcheck. It’s a free tool from the WordPress repository and works with all the different editions of WordPress, including the most popular WordPress.com and WordPress.org. In addition, this tool also integrates with major email providers to allow you to quickly delete spam messages as they arrive through your email account.
All-in-One WP Package
If you’re looking to launch a new blog or website, but don’t want to go through the trouble of installing WordPress individually on your server, you can use the All-in-One WP package. This is a bundled download of WordPress, along with its most popular plugins and themes. To get started, visit their website and click on the Get Started button. You will then be directed to their shared hosting package, where you can choose the plan that suits you.
Once you’re on this page, click on the blue Continue button to continue to the All-in-One WP dashboard. Here you can download the WordPress package and start using it right away on your own domain. You don’t have to go through the trouble of installing WordPress individually on your server.
Online Marketing Tools
One of the things that made WordPress so popular is that it can be used to power all sorts of blogs and websites, not just content-related ones. This gave birth to the “content-less” websites, which are websites that don’t have any content at all, but exist to provide a service. Such as a free hosting service.
If you’re looking to create a content-less website for the purpose of earning some extra cash or just want to experiment, you can use the Online Marketing tools from WordPress. These are a suite of tools that can help you get the most out of your blog or website.
Live Chat
Another great way to increase engagement with your audience is through the use of live chat. Nowadays, many website platforms have moved towards including live chat functionality as a standard part of their offering. This is typically accessed through the use of a widget that will appear on each web page.