Guide on how to build a WordPress website

In this guide on how to build a WordPress website,  web-tools.club  will guide you step by step in building your own WordPress website. Building a website is going to give us a lot of satisfaction. A pleasant sensation will invade us knowing that with this, we will be part of the internet.

This guide is designed for users of any age and any level of expertise.

We will answer some questions below before moving on to the main topic.

What is required to build our WordPress website?

To build our website we will require the following elements:

• A domain name. Example, yourdomain.com.
• A WordPress hosting. This is where our website will be stored.
• Patience and a few minutes of our time.

What is the cost of a WordPress site?

The cost will depend on the type of web page that we want.

The cost of a standard business website will depend on its size and the tools used. But we should always start with few features and continue to expand as our business grows.

If we do it this way, we can save on costs and time, as well as avoiding excessive expenses.

What is the best web platform?

There are many website builders available who could help us set up our website. However, we recommend using hosted WordPress as a platform for our website.

WordPress is the most widespread and popular web platform in the world. It powers almost a third of Internet websites.

It is free and has a wide range of website designs and extensions. It is quite flexible and works with a large number of tools and services available on the Internet for all website owners.

Steps to follow

1. Configuration of our website

The most common mistake of those who start in building their own website is not knowing which platform to choose.

The first thing we will do is use the most correct and convenient option: a self-hosted WordPress site. This option comes with a large number of designs and plugins or accessories that allow us to create the website that we want or imagine.

WordPress software is free and available to anyone who wants to download and use it to build any type of web page without any restrictions.

This software is free because we will have to organize our own website by entering our domain name and build our accommodation. And this obviously costs money.

The name of our domain will correspond to our web address on the Internet. This is the name that our users will write in their browsers to enter our website (for example, yourdomain.com).

We will also need hosting for our site. This is equivalent to having a house. This house will be the home of our website on the Internet.

We can consult with our selected WordPress hosting provider to agree on prices and take advantage of their offers. Among the offers, could be to register our domain name for free.

2. How to install WordPress

When entering cPanel from our hosting provider account, we will find an Install WordPress icon .

Next we will see the quick installation screen of our web service provider for WordPress. We click the Start button to continue.

In the following screenshot, we will be asked to select the domain name where we want to install WordPress. We choose our domain in the drop-down field and then click Next .

Then we enter the name of our website, the user of the site administrator and a password to enter the administrator area of ​​our website. This information if we wish can be changed later.

Also, we will mark all the checkboxes and then click Install to continue.

Then WordPress will begin to be installed on our site. Meanwhile, it will show us some examples of templates for websites that we can choose to install on our site.

The previous step can be skipped since we can select the template we want later.

After the installation of WordPress, we will see a message that will indicate that the installation was successful.

Then we will click on Complete installation to take us to the WordPress login screen.

With this, we have completed the creation of our first WordPress website.

Now we go to our WordPress login page whose address is the following:

http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Where www.yourdomain.com we replace it with our registered domain name.

We will now be able to log into our WordPress site using our administrator username and password entered at startup during registration.

3. Select the theme of our WordPress site

Our website may have an appearance that stands out to us or that is unattractive. WordPress provides us with the opportunity to display the look that suits our blog or business. Through professional design templates, with WordPress, we can achieve the look we want for free.

By default, each WordPress site comes with a basic theme. If we visit our website, then we will see this on our screen:

Although this theme is not attractive to many users, WordPress has many free and non-free themes that we can install on our site

We can change themes from the WordPress administrator panel. To do this we enter the Appearance -> Themes page and then click on the Add new button.

In the following image, we show where we can search among the more than 4,000 free WordPress themes available in the official WordPress.org directory.

Themes can be organized by filters like popular, featured, and latest. You can also filter topics by their use or nature of the website such as industry, design, etc.

For the purpose of illustrating this guide, we will use a random theme. This is a free theme and very popular with WordPress users, it is multipurpose and has quite flexible design options for any type of website.

If we already know the name of the theme that we want to install, we can locate it by writing its name in the search field.

Once found, WordPress will allow us to install it by clicking on the Install button.

Once the selected theme is installed, we can customize it by clicking Customize located in the Appearance menu.

This will open the theme customizer where we can change its settings, being able to see the results of the changes, in a real-time preview, of our website.

It is not required to finish configuring our theme immediately. We can finish the configuration when we already have a certain amount of information on our website.

Now we will see how to add content to our WordPress website.

4. How to add content to our WordPress site

In WordPress, we have two default options to start adding content called posts and pages.

The posts would be part of a blog and are arranged in chronological order. Articles will be viewed from newest to oldest.

Instead, the pages are intended for unique static content, such as the fixed pages that identify the place, privacy policies, contact page, etc.

By default, WordPress presents blog posts on the front page of our website. We can change when we want the main page for another that seems more convenient.

We can create a separate page from our blog or news section. We can even create our website without any blog section.

We will see below, how to add content to our website.

We will start by adding some pages to our website. We should not worry if there are a few pages or content at first. We can always edit and update them.

We will start by clicking the Add new page link located in the WordPress administration area. This action will take us to the page editor screen as shown in the following image:

First, we will provide a title to our page, we will call it Home.

Later, we can add content with the text editor. We can add text, images, links, audio, and even embed videos.

Once the desired content has been added to our page, we click Publish to activate it on our website.

We can continue adding content to make up the different sections or subjects of our site. We could have, for example, an information page, a contact page, and a blog page where we will show our publications.

We will now add some blog posts.

We head to Add New in the WordPress admin area.

We will see a screen similar to the previous one when adding pages.

We can add publication titles to later add content in the editor. We will also notice that there are additional options such as formats, categories, and labels.

We can click the Save button to store our publication, either as a draft until it is definitively finished. When it is ready, we can publish it by clicking Publish to make it visible on our website.

5. Customizing and tweaking our WordPress site

Now that we have created some content for our website, the ideal would be to personalize it and place it in such a way that it looks attractive and presentable.

We will start with the configuration of the static front page or cover page.

Setting up a static cover

To begin, we will visit the Settings -> Reading page in the WordPress administrator area. Underneath, in the Home Page option, we click on the static Home Page and select the pages that we created previously to select our home page and blog.

At the end of the selection, we must click on Save changes located at the bottom.

Going forward, WordPress will use the Home page as the front page of our website and the Blog page to showcase our blog posts.

The change site title and tag

At the time of installation, we can choose the title of our website. WordPress automatically adds a line to tag the title of our site that says Another WordPress site.

We can change the title and label of our site at any time by going to the Configuration -> General page.

The title of our site is equivalent to the name of the website such as:  https://www.siteground.com/ . The tag line, in general, is a line that describes our site. We could leave the label line blank if we wish.

We should not skip clicking the Save Changes button to save the settings.

Configure comment settings

WordPress incorporates the possibility that users can leave comments on our publications. It is a way of interacting with our users or clients, but it also serves as a gateway for spammers.

The way to combat spammers is by moderating comments on our website.

For this, we must go to Settings -> Discussions and at the bottom, we look for the box Before a comment appears. We check the box next to The comment must be manually approved

After completing the configuration of the comments, we click on the Save changes button.

Create navigation menus

In order for users to browse our website on different pages or sections, the navigation menus are required. WordPress includes in each of its themes a powerful navigation menu system.

Let’s see how to add a navigation menu to our website. First, we enter Appearance -> Menus and enter a name for our navigation menu. Then we click on the Create menu button.

It is at this time that WordPress will create our navigation menu. The menu will be empty for now.

To fill it we must select the pages that we want to show in our menu and then click on Add to menu.

Now you will notice that the pages previously selected by us appear in the menu area. We can move them up or down to our liking or convenience and thus organize their placement on the menu

Next, we will select the location of our menu. The locations are provided by our WordPress theme. In general, the vast majority of WordPress themes have the main menu at the top of the screen.

To finish, we will click on the Save menu to store the configuration.

To view the changes, we can enter our page from a browser.

6. Installation of plugins

The WordPress plugins are applications that allow you to include features that improve the appearance, performance, and the performance of our WordPress web pages. There are plugins for photo galleries, various forms, site security, for backups, anti-spam, web positioning, etc.

There are currently around 5,000 WordPress plugins. You can also find plugins designed by private developers or third parties.

Experience tells us that the essential free plugins that we should install on our website are the following:

Improve the features of our website

• WPForms Lite : allows you to include contact forms to our WordPress site.
• Envira Gallery Lite – Add pretty attractive image galleries for our WordPress site.
• MonsterInsights – Links our website to Google Analytics. This Google tool will allow our visitors to find and use our website repeatedly.

Optimize our website

• Yoast SEO : used to improve our WordPress SEO and get more traffic from Google.
• WP Super Cache : improve the speed of our website.

Improve security

• Updraft Plus : automatically creates scheduled backups of our website.
• Sucuri : Audits the security of our website and scans it for malware.

7. Gaining skills in handling WordPress

WordPress is easy to use, very powerful and effective content management system. But we will probably need help in very specific cases.

There is a lot of WordPress support available for free on the Internet. web-tools.club offers an important amount of information that can be of valuable help in trying to solve our questions.

We can find important resources for the construction, administration, and maintenance of our website completely free.

Some frequently asked questions on how to build a WordPress website

Below, we’ll answer some questions, which are frequently asked by our users, about how to build a WordPress website.