[Article] WordPress: Setting Up Your New Website

Portfolio Note: This article was written for a non-technical audience with basic computer literacy. The goal of this document is to teach someone who has no website development knowledge how to set up a basic WordPress website.

If you need a simple website solution, you might already know about WordPress. 39.6% of websites on the Internet use WordPress as a content management system (CMS)¹. A good CMS is vital for establishing a website that uses modern website design principle and empowers anyone to build websites without a technical background. It’s no surprise that WordPress, renowned for its flexibility and accessibility, is widely used for websites of all purposes. Anything from shopping platforms to simple blogs is possible with WordPress.

Getting Started

The first step to setting up a WordPress website is to find a web host that offers WordPress installation packages. Web hosts are service providers that provide server space to host a website. Contrary to what you may assume, web hosts services also don’t have to cost money just to start a website. There are many web hosts, both free and paid, that may suit your needs.

However, it can be overwhelming to look at web hosts, especially if you don’t know what you need from one. Let’s go over some of the main factors to look for when choosing a web host for a WordPress website.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the measure of how much traffic your website is getting, or more accurately, a measurement of how much data a server is having to send back and forth whenever someone views a web page hosted on their server. Most free web hosts and some paid web hosts cap how much bandwidth your website can generate. If you’ve seen a website go viral online (e.g., a popular Reddit post links to a small blog webpage) and the website goes down later with an Error 509: Bandwidth Exceeded page, that is why.

Be realistic about your bandwidth needs. For instance, if you want to start a blog and don’t have a large following from elsewhere, you might not need a lot of bandwidth immediately. If you’re building a website for a business, however, you would want your web page to be viewable by anyone at any time. A website that’s down due to exceeding bandwidth limits can look embarrassing, especially if it happens while someone is trying to research your business to see if it suits their needs.

Disk Space

Disk space refers to how much data your website occupies on the web host’s server(s). The file sizes of all the images on your websites, as well as any other assets, will add up to occupy disk space, just like on your computer’s hard drive. If you have many images, videos, and sound files as assets on your website, you will need a web host service that will have enough disk space for your website. If you do not plan to use many assets on your websites, disk space should not be as important in your search for a web host.

Price of Hosting and Other Costs

Of course, the price of web hosting is a huge factor in considering a web host for many individuals and small businesses. There are two major categories for web hosts: free web hosts and paid web hosts.

Free Hosting

Free web hosts are a viable option for many people who do not want to spend a lot of money on hosting services. Many websites do not generate direct revenue (e.g., through a shopping platform or advertising). However, many free web hosts put advertising or other mandatory banners onto your web pages which may look unprofessional to your audience.

Free web hosts also tend to have lower bandwidth and disk space limits. These limits are problematic for websites that receive heavy traffic and use large asset files. Free web hosts also do not come with free domain names, so you would have to pay for a domain name separately or use a subdomain of one of the host’s domains instead (e.g., Bob chooses to host his bakery website at a web host called Freehost.com without a domain name, so his URL might be https://www.bobsbakery.freehost.com).

Paid Hosting

Paid hosting refers to a web host that charges money for their web hosting services, typically in different plans of varying costs. Many paid web host services come with a free domain name of your choice, which is the expected norm for any website intended for a business (e.g., Bob’s Bakery might have a website called https://www.bobsbakery.com).

Should you have the budget for a paid web host, be aware that many web hosts advertise a monthly price billed as one annual price, which means you pay a large sum up-front for an entire year’s service. Actual monthly bill plans are often more expensive in the long run compared to the advertised yearly cost, but if you are uncertain about how long you will need the website and you don’t want to spend a lot of money, an actual monthly bill plan might be the best option.

Other Costs

Plugins and themes are other things to consider when looking at the overall cost of hosting a WordPress website. Plugins are add-ons to the WordPress software that add extra functionality to your website, such as a shopping platform or an anti-spam filter for the comments section on your blog pages. Themes are the ‘skin,’ or the overall look, of your website. While many plugins and themes are freely available, some plugins and themes may cost money to acquire and set up on your WordPress website.

Installing and Configuring WordPress

Once you have selected a web host, the next step is to install WordPress onto your website. The cPanel software web hosts commonly use to install a CMS like WordPress may look different from service to service. However, the general flow of actions should be consistent across web hosts, and many web host services have more specific guides tailored to their user interfaces for installing WordPress. Namecheap’s web hosting service is used here as the model for this list of instructions.

1. Log into your web host’s cPanel.

2. Locate your web host’s WordPress package and click on it (see Figure 1).

3. Click the Install button. This will bring you to the installation window (see Figure 2).

4. Fill the Admin Username, Admin Password, and Admin E-mail fields with your information.

   Caution: Use a secure and unique password and a unique admin username to prevent security issues.

5. Scroll down to find and click the Install button.
6. Wait for the installation process to finish.

Once the installation process is complete, you will receive an administrative URL to interact with your new website’s Dashboard, which handles the backend of your website. This administrative URL usually is in the form of a URL with /wp-admin/ after your domain name, e.g., Bob’s Bakery has a WordPress website with a URL of https://www.bobsbakery.com, and the administrative URL is https://www.bobsbakery.com/wp-admin/.

Setting the Site Title and Tagline

Now that your WordPress software has finished installing, it’s time to edit your new website to look the way you want it to look. The first thing to do is to set the title and tagline of your new website, which will show up on every page you create.

1. Log into your WordPress Dashboard using the administrative URL and the username and password you set previously in the installation process.

2. Scroll down to Settings on the left-hand bar, then click General from the drop-down menu to access General Settings (see Figure 3).

3. Fill in the Site Title and Tagline.
4. Scroll down the page to find the Save Changes button, then click it.

Changing Themes

Once you have finished setting a title and tagline for your website, it’s time for the most crucial part of your website’s aesthetic: choosing a theme. Themes can radically transform a WordPress website to look less like a blog and resemble a slick and modern shopping platform or a clean portfolio website. Themes are downloaded and installed from WordPress’s official theme archive, but there’s a quick and easy way to do it from your WordPress Dashboard:

1. Scroll to Appearance on the left-hand bar, then click Themes from the drop-down menu.
2. Click the Add New button next to the Themes header.

3. Browse through the themes available to you in the Add Themes window (see Figure 4). Once you find one you want to install, hover over the theme’s preview window and click Install.

4. Click the Activate button.

   Note: Depending on the theme you installed, you may have additional prompts to install other configurations to achieve the theme developer’s intended look.

5. Type the URL for your website into your browser to see your website’s new theme.

Installing Plugins

Plugins are valuable additions to a WordPress website, such as adding automatic spam filters to reduce spam comments on your blog posts. Like themes, plugins are typically downloaded and installed from WordPress’s official plugin archive, but they can be downloaded and installed right from your WordPress dashboard:

1. Scroll to Plugins on the left-hand bar, then click Add New from the drop-down menu.

2. Browse through the plugins available to you in the Add Plugins screen (see Figure 5). Once you find one you want to install, click the Install Now button next to the plugin’s name.

3. Find and click Installed Plugins on the left-hand bar underneath Plugins.

4. Find your newly installed plugin in the list of installed plugins. Click Activate under the name of the plugin.

   Note: Depending on the plugin you installed, you may have additional prompts or a wizard to go through to finish activating the plugin.

Adding a New Page

Pages make up the bulk of a non-blog WordPress website. Recent versions of WordPress use a block system to make adding pages easy for WordPress beginners. This document is a quick start guide, so the block system isn’t fully documented here, but the very basics of publishing a new page are as follows:

1. Scroll to Pages on the left-hand bar, then click Add New from the drop-down menu. You will now see the Page editor (Figure 6).

2. Click on Add Title and fill in your page title.

3. Click on Type / to choose a block and fill in your content.

   Note: Click the Save Draft button in the top-right corner of the screen to save your progress whenever you edit a page.

4. Click the Publish button in the top-right corner of the screen to publish your page once you are satisfied.

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