How to Host Your WordPress Site on Site5

Hi, welcome to Site5! Thanks for stopping by. My name is Alex and I’ll be helping you with anything you need to know about hosting your WordPress site. I’ll be using WordPress 5.0.1 to keep things simple and easy to follow along.

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in use today, handling over 80% of all websites worldwide. So it’s the perfect platform for you to build your site on.

Since WordPress is open source, anyone can download it for free and you don’t need to worry about paying for Web hosting or getting a certificate. All you need to do is visit the WordPress.org website and click on the Get WordPress button to start the installation process. Once you’ve downloaded the WordPress software, you can launch the setup wizard and follow the instructions. When the setup process is finished, you’ll be able to access your new WordPress site from anywhere.

Step one: Choose a domain name and install WordPress

The first step in your WordPress journey is to choose a unique and catchy domain name for your site. Ideally, you want something that’s short and easy to remember, but not so similar to other sites that it looks spammy. A good rule of thumb is to use your company’s abbreviations and/or acronyms in your domain name. For example, if you work in tech, you could choose techgoals.com as your domain name. Or if you run a food blog, you could name it foodblog.com

Next, you’ll want to install WordPress. To do this, simply visit the WordPress.org website and click on the Get WordPress button to start the installation process. Follow the prompts to input your website’s information and click on the Continue button to begin the download. Once the download is finished and you’ve launched the WordPress setup wizard, click on the Install button to begin the installation process. When the setup completes, you can access your WordPress dashboard.

From here, you can do all of the basic setup tasks, like adding and editing content, taking care of your blog’s appearance, or setting up automated email broadcasts. However, for the most part, you’ll just want to walk through the motions until you get familiar with how things work. You can also use the WordPress back office to manage the content of your site, track its performance, and take care of any necessary maintenance tasks. To get started, visit the WordPress dashboard and click on the Tools button in the upper-right corner.

Step two: Upload your website’s content to WordPress

Now that you have WordPress installed on your computer, it’s time to upload the content for your site. To do this, click on the Import tab on the left side of the dashboard and browse your computer’s hard drive for the files you want to upload. Remember, WordPress is a content management system, so all of the content you bring in will be stored and organized into posts and pages. The posts and pages will be arranged into a blog format, just as you imagined when you decided to create a blog around your website.

To get started, click on the Import tab on the left side of the dashboard and click on the Choose Files button to select your files. Browse to the location where you stored the files you want to import and click on the Open button to begin the upload process. Make sure you click on the Back button in the upper-right corner once the upload process is finished to return to the dashboard.

Now, you’ll want to arrange your content into posts and pages, just as you’d arrange the content on any other blog or website. To do this, click on the Posts button in the upper-right corner of the dashboard. This will open up a menu of your site’s content, along with a few other options like Drafts and Comments. From here, click on the Posts button next to the content you want to arrange into a blog post. This will pop up a format button and a toolbar with publishing controls.

From the toolbar, you can click on the Read More… button to open up a teaser for the blog post. This is a short excerpt of the content that will appear in the blog post itself. You can click on the Preview button to see how the post will look when published.

To arrange your content into pages, click on the Pages button in the upper-right corner of the dashboard. This will open up a menu of your site’s content, along with a few other options like Drafts and Comments. From here, you can click on the Pages button next to the content you want to arrange into a page.

From the toolbar on the left, you can click on the Publish button to publish the page. You can also use the Options tab on the right to make some small tweaks to the design or layout of your page. Alternatively, you can use the Preview button to see how the page will look when published.

Step three: Customize your website’s appearance

The last step in your WordPress journey is to customize the appearance of your site. If you’re feeling creative, you can choose a different header for your site, add or remove padding from the blog post and page layouts, and change the color or pattern of your links and buttons. You can use the Theme Options feature in the WordPress dashboard to make these changes.

To remove the header from your site, click on the Settings tab on the left side of the dashboard and navigate to the Appearance section. Here, you can choose a different header for your site or remove the one you’ve currently got chosen by clicking on the X icon next to it. 

To remove the navigation bar at the top of your site, click on the Settings tab on the left side of the dashboard and navigate to the Appearance section. Here, you can choose a different header for your site or remove the one you’ve currently got chosen by clicking on the X icon next to it. You can also use this option to remove the menu bar along the left side of the page.

At this point, you can also install a premium WordPress theme from the dashboard, as well as download some free themes from WordPress.org. To keep things simple, let’s go with the default TwentyFourteen theme.

This theme is simple, clean, and easy to customize, so it’s a perfect option for beginners. To remove the header from your site, click on the Settings tab on the left side of the dashboard and navigate to the Appearance section. Here, you can choose a different header for your site or remove the one you’ve currently got chosen by clicking on the X icon next to it. 

Now that you have the header removed, it’s time to take a look at the blog post and page layouts. The default TwentyFourteen theme comes with three blog page layouts and three matching blog post layouts, all of which are based on the same grid system. To arrange the content into different layouts, just click on the Posts or Pages button in the upper-right corner of the dashboard.

This will open up a menu of your site’s content, along with a few other options like Drafts and Comments. From here, you can click on the Posts or Pages button next to the content you want to format into the blog post or page layout you want to use.

The choice is yours. You can choose a different header, set the number of columns in the grid, and switch the layout options using the buttons at the bottom of the post and page tabs.

That’s it!

There, now you have a fully functional WordPress site. If you followed along and did everything according to plan, you should now have a WordPress site up and running without any problems. If you did everything correctly, you should now be looking at the Preview screen of your site in your browser. If you see something unexpected, like a coding error or stray mark-up, it’s usually because you’re a beginner and haven’t yet learned all of the tricks and shortcuts for web development. Don’t worry, this is all easily fixable. Just use your browser’s debugging tools to find the errors and get your site up and running once more.