Recently, the Shopify’s CEO, the Substack CEO and SquareSpace have made some… interesting choices with their voices. If you’re looking to get off an oligarch-owned platform and OWN your own, your best choice is WordPress for a website, blog or e-commerce site. We’ll talk about the super easy way to set up your first WordPress site and blog in this article and video, and we’ll cover getting your website and e-commerce site off those platforms easily in other blog posts.
Why choose WordPress?
First off, everyone knows about it, and there are a lot of opinions on it online. Some say “it’s hard” and others say “it’s easy” I will counter with, it’s easy if you have someone showing you how to get started, and that is what I’m going to do here. It powers nearly 37% of the internet (I’ve seen numbers like 43% now too, but regardless, NO OTHER SINGLE PLATFORM owns so much web real estate and there’s a good reason why. There are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com is a hosting business that installs and runs WordPress sites on their servers. You can go with this option (it’s mostly the same platform, some features are available only at higher pricing tiers). And then there’s WordPress.org, the original open-source platform which EVERY hosting company will let you or offer you a one-click install. You choose your hosting. GoDaddy? Cheap and effective. WPEngine? Enterprise-class down to starter sites, good for growth plans. Flywheel (WPE owned), good for agencies and people with multiple sites.
In any case you can choose your hosting price and everyone has a one-click install for WordPress. There are over a million plugins and most of them are free for basic use, extra features come under their premium plans (and many of them are incredibly sophisticated standalone apps in their own right if not for being developed for WordPress.)
If you’re a blogger, WordPress is the perfect setup. You can have pretty much everything that Substack does minus the concerning alt-right propaganda and shady intentions of the owners of it. And it’s yours. All yours! Most people find out about Substack sites via social media (it’s own problematic oligarchs, too), but on WordPress you OWN your own list, your own blog and your own content! You can choose to enable AI or deflect it. There are a lot of options for monetization, including membership and email plugins.
Let’s get started building your WordPress website
You will need:
About one or two hours for this process once you have the following assembled:
1 website hosting company. GoDaddy, Flywheel, WPEngine are some that our clients (and we) use.
1 URL. You can use Go Daddy, Network Solutions, NameCheap for this. Just order and hang on til your WordPress site and blog is ready
Enough content to get started – 4-5 blog posts, an About page, a home page and if you’re a business, a services overview. If you’re starting a commerce store, you’ll need product information, but that will be covered in another video and resources later.
A logo, photos (please take these yourself, I have lots of articles about how to do this; or use a photographer. Stock is OK but not ideal.)
Step 1: Install WordPress on your host. Go to GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress to get started (or the home page of your host). Purchase (if you have not already) the WordPress site. You’ll get a login and password for your administrative area.
Step 2: Install a theme. The basic one that comes with WordPress install is fine if you don’t want to purchase one, there are lots of great free themes you can browse. In your WordPress admin bar choose Appearance>Themes and search there.
Step 3: Go to Appearance>customize to customize your theme. In this area (see in the video below) you will be adding your logo, selecting your site colors and adding a menu where you want it.
Step 4: Settings>General>reading select the page you want as your home page. If you haven’t yet built a home page, choose the Sample Page (we’ll edit this later) and if your blog doesn’t yet have a page for it (just a blank page called Blog for now), you can wait on this until you do. Go to pages>add new page> Title it Blog and publish (then go back to settings to select this page as your blog. We’ll customize what’s on this page later.
Step 5: copy/paste the content for your home page onto the sample page or go to pages>new> and create a new page for your homepage. Give it a good name like [yourbusiness what you do] so for one of mine it’s Boat Registration Stickers your source for easy to apply boat registration decals. Google sees this as boatregistrationstickers.com/boat-registration-stickers-your-source-for-easy-to-apply-boat-registration-stickers. Guess what we do? Boat registration stickers! LOL. Google needs that info to match it to people’s requests on search. We’ll customize this page in the video, but go ahead and paste the content you wrote for this page now. Publish when done.
Step 6: Pages>new page> About [your business or your name] for your about page. Copy and paste your about page content, add some photos and publish
Step 7: posts>add new copy and paste in your first blog post. Save and publish. We’ll customize this page in the video. Repeat for 3-5 more blogs. Visit your /blog page (that you created in step 4) to see what the default layout is. We’ll customize this in the video.
Step 8: YOUR BASIC WORDPRESS SITE IS DONE! Yes! I am that excited for you! Done!
This basic process takes about 1-2 hours total. The customization and tweaking will take a little longer but you can work on it over time.
Step 9: point your URL to your new website. If your domain and your site are on the same host (aka GoDaddy) you may already just have yoursite.com working fine. If you’re on Flyweel, WPEngine or another host that doesn’t have domain registration, you will need to go to your hosting control center, and set up your URL. Most big hosts have an automatic fetcher for URL setups in their system (see the video for examples of this) that make it super easy.
Next up? How to completely customize that new WordPress site of yours!