Pallavi explains How to Quickly Create a Wordpress Blog?

So, you want to create a word press blog.The good news is—it’s simple to create a word press blog. The fact that to be able to create and start a blog in just 15 minutes, you should know ‘what’ you need to do and how you can do it. Surprisingly, it’s easy to implement.

A quick note over here: This guide doesn’t work with “Wordpress.com”. Instead, this guide put light on starting your own blog using self-hosted word press where you’re in full control.

Creating a Blog: What you’ll need

To get started, here is what you need to do

1. Have a domain idea relevant to your business or requirement.
2. A web hosting account.

So, after the research completes for the name, and you need to be particular in choosing a name, you need to get started with the second part.

Here is a quick reference for the getting done the second part—the right way.

Sign up with a web hosting program. (The First recommendation would be: Blue host)
Choose a hosting plan
Pick up the domain name
Complete your hosting registration
Install word press

For a brief mention, you need to know that after you are running fine, you’ll probably want to start writing and likely alter its appearance or functionality. To help you do that, we’ll also show you how to:

Write your first blog post.
Change the “theme”.
Choosing the “plugins”.

Based on the above methodology, in this tutorial, we will cover:

The perfect way to register a domain name for free
Choosing the best web hosting and Install WordPress
Change the theme
Write the first blog post
Customisation of WordPress with plugins
Adding a Contact Form
Setting up Google Analytics
Optimize the site for SEO

Step1: How do you Set up the WordPress Blog

For professionals, it’s is customary to use wordpress.org, which is also known as self- hosted word press. You might wonder; Why wordpress.org and not wordpress.com?

The difference is with wordpress.org, you get the opportunity of free usage, plugin installations, site customizations as per need, and most accurately you could generate various channels for monetization with lesser restrictions.

You might want to check out the differences here.

The next point to ponder is choosing a suitable web hosting program. I am sure you are clear with your domain name by now. That’s is going to give you an address over the internet, and web hosting is where your website lives. That’s your land or house on the internet.

To begin with, here’s the best one —Blue host. That’s the official word press recommendation hosting provider due to the collaboration since 2005.

So, Let’s go ahead and purchase you the domain.

To get started, click on the “Get Started Button and choose you your plan. In the interim stage, You’ll be asked to provide a suitable domain name for free.

Lastly, you will need to fill up the account information. While on the screen, you could see extra options, but it is wise not to opt it now. You can always add them later on if you decide to use them.

Once complete, you will see an email confirmation with details on how to login the cPanel. There is where you manage all things, from support to emails and other things. Most importantly, this is where you will install WordPress.

Step 2: Installation of WordPress

Inside the cPanel, you could explore several small icons for different services and features. Consequently, after you click the WordPress icon, you will be redirected to the Blue Host Marketplace for a quick install.

The next step involves providing the domain name, site name, user name, and password for installing WordPress. Don’t forget to check all the boxes in the page before hitting the “Install” button.

Now that the WordPress installation is complete, your word press login URL will look like this:

Now, we’re ready to customize the site and start blogging.

Step 3: Setting up the WordPress Theme

The vital part of setting your blog apart from others is introducing innovation in the visuals of the blog. So, you should be able to customize the blog. For that, there are thousands of pre-made WordPress themes that you can install on your site. Some of them are free, while others are payable.

You could change your theme by going to your WordPress dashboard and clicking on Appearance >Themes.

Inside the marketplace, you could choose the perfect theme aligned with your business. Click “Install”, and activate it later.

After you install your theme, you could customize it by clicking on the Customize link under the Appearance menu.

Now, we are ready to create the first blog post.

Step 4: Creating the First Blog Post

To get started with your first blog post, click on the Posts > Add New menu in your WordPress dashboard.

You will find an editor area where you could write your first blog post.

Now, in the editor section, you will notice find other parts, such as Categories and Tags. You want to use tags and categories to organize your blog posts.

Let’s brief you on this:

Categories are the macro-data just like the table of the index of an e-book, which lets you know the reason for the blog’s existence. By contrast, tags are the micro-data or the e-book’s index words.

The difference is Categories are hierarchical so you can have sub-categories, and Tags are not hierarchical.

Step 5: Installation of Plugins

After having all these, you would want to add other usual elements on your website like contact forms, galleries, sliders.

That’s where plug-in comes to play.

Here’s a list of essential plugins:

Everest Forms (FREE)
Jetpack (Freemium)
Akismet (Freemium)
Yoast SEO (Freemium)
User Registration (Freemium)
Google XML Sitemaps (FREE)

A. How do you create a Contact Form?

Forms are a must forever website for communication opportunity.

To cater to the requirement, “WPForms Lite plugin”, which is a free version is popular with WordPress.

You could install the plugin by going to Plugins >Add New page, type WPForms in the search box and click “Install” and “Activate”.

Consequently, upon activation, you need to head over to WPForms >Add New page to create your first form.

Later, you want to add the “form” inside a contact page of your website.

B. How to set up Google Analytics?

For audience research, you might want to install the analytics software.

To begin with, You open a Google account and log on with the free Google analytics account.

Therein, You will be asked to provide your information and website URL. After that, you get your Google Analytics tracking code.

Now, you could manually add the code to your site, but that’s an old and formidable story.

More suitably, now, you could use a plugin for automation of the code adds.

The plugin is “MonsterInsights”. It is the free version of the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, and it is the easiest way to add Google Analytics on your site.

Under the Insights> Setting page, you want to configure the plugin settings and click on the ‘Authenticate with your Google account’ button to connect Google Analytics to your WordPress site.

Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the setup.

C. How to optimize your Blog for SEO?

To get started with, first, you need to install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin That’s the WordPress SEO plugin that helps optimize your blog.

Once it gets activated, you will be able to see a new menu item labeled ‘SEO’. After you click on it, you land on the plugin settings page, where you could configure the plugin.

As you proceed to write posts, you could find the utility of the plugins to guide you through producing highly optimized SEO posts.