Basics of setting up a WordPress website

Step 1 – Get to know your website

Whether you’re a new website owner, or you’ve moved your hosting to us and you want a refresher to get reacquainted with your website, this will help you work out where to start. Even established website owners are advised to come back to basics and check they have all bases covered.

A great thing about our hosting is that, unlike a hosted platform such as wix or wordpress.com, your website is yours; you own the files so you’re in complete control, and as you have access to your site’s core files, there’s no end to the developing you can do. But having so much control can open up problems, and if you’re in too deep, someone with more knowledge than you may be needed – this can cost greatly. So, the Time Machine Tip below could well be the most important lesson of your entire website journey.

In the first instance, you need to be familiar with these basics:

Step 1 – admin

1. Your domain registration – Store your domain registration login details where you can access them. You won’t often need to login to your domain hosting which means it’s easy to forget, and your domain and hosting registrations may be different. Also make sure you keep up with your renewals – set it to auto renew but perhaps keep a note of the date so you’re not surprised when the cost comes out of your account. It could be annually, 2 yearly or more. Note that should you register with us, we will endeavour to contact you many times should payments default to avoid having to turn off any website.
2. Your Hosting Registration – This is through us, you won’t often need to login to your hosting control panel, but it will be more often than your domain. You can use the Hosting Hub link above to find the link to your hosting control panel, and its wise to keep your login details where you can find them.
3. Emails – Know your email addresses and how you access them (through your hosting control panel), you could lose track of them if you have too many and miss out on important messages. We always recommend choosing an email address that reflects your domain. Gmail and hotmail addresses are not regarded as professional so take advantage of your email addresses available in your hosting package.
4. Your WordPress Login – Again make a note of this, our computers are great at remembering passwords but we should’t rely on this. Make a note, it’s easier all round.

Step 2 – You have your hosting, what next?

Your hosting is ready and you’re looking at a fresh install of WordPress, so how do you create your own unique website? When you login to your site, you’ll be taken to your dashboard. From here you can add pages, posts, reply to comments, check settings, install themes and plugins and widgets, and more.

Let’s start with some initial steps:

1. The WordPress Dashboard – where the magic happens. When you login to your site, this is where you’ll land. From here you can add pages, posts, reply to comments, check settings, install themes and plugins and widgets, and more. 
2. Basic WordPress Settings:  There are 3 essential tabs that need your initial attention:
   1. GENERAL – where you can edit the site name and tagline. Tip: include keywords in both.
   2. READING is where you can set which page on your site will be your home page. Although depending on your chosen theme, your theme’s settings may override this.
   3. PERMALINKS – is where you tell the site how to structure your post names, ‘Post Name’ is ideal for site navigation and SEO and we recommend changing the default to this setting.
3. Install a Theme – We all want our sites to look both fantastic and unique to us so the first thing you need is a theme; it’s what your site will look like. Imagine it’s the clothes your site will wear, which you’ll customise with your own accessories (colours & plugins).  Themes can bring both joy and fear in equal measures! There are some wonderful free and paid for themes out there but changing a theme can create a challenge. It may look wonderful on the theme developers demo page but once you install it, it’s all over the place! This is common so no need to panic, but be aware that you may have to spend time making changes to get it looking how you want it. For this reason, please back up your site before making changes. But upon a first install you have no content so you’re ok to go ahead without a back up at this stage.

   Staging Site – Our hosting gives you the option to create a staging site, from your hosting control panel (see the hosting hub) we recommend this for when you want to change your site. If you balls it up, you can easily start over!

   But for now, go ahead and click on the themes link on your dashboard. From this page you can click on add new at the top, where you’ll be able to browse the thousands of free themes available to you. The core WordPress themes are trusted and reliable but when you search for others, we would recommend doing your homework and check out their reviews, because once your site is full of content, customising a theme can be time consuming and it’s frustrating to start over.

   Free themes: https://justfreethemes.com is a good place to research free themes. 
   An excellent theme for an online store (see our how to guide below) is https://woocommerce.com/storefront
   
   Paid-For themes: You can also buy themes, these are some popular options:
   https://theme.co
   https://themeforest.net
   https://www.elegantthemes.com – Divi designers and who we use.

   You’ll need to follow your chosen theme’s instructions on customising it to have your colours, images, fonts etc. Once it looks the way you want it to, you’ll be able to start adding content.

4. Create your first page (Blog page):
   From your dashboard create new page and name it “Blog”. This page is where your blog posts will appear. You need to add the latest posts block to the page by clicking the +. Scroll down to sorting & filtering option in the right hand column to specify the blog post category.
   OR: Go to customise/homepage & set posts page to BLOG.
   Now create a sample post that you would like to appear on your blog page. Go to dashboard/posts/add new. Add a new “blog” category and from the new post, set it to the blog category. This tells WordPress where to show your post. In this instance a new post with the category marked as blog will appear on the blog page.
   
5. Add contact page – use the Forminator plugin to catch your data if your chosen plugin does not have a built in contact page.
6. Edit Menu – From the dashboard/appearance/menus you’ll be able to create the menu that appears as your site navigation. Depending on your theme you may have more options for example having a sub menu or more.
7. Gutenburg or Classic? WordPress introduced a new editing system and called it Gutenburg. Some older themes don’t play nicely with this new system, and some experienced users struggle to get on with it. You can easily switch back to the classic editor with the Classic editor plugin. It’s free and available from plugins/add new. Please note that the e-commerce theme Storefront which we recommend for new stores plays nicely if not better with Gutenberg.
8. Plugins – Plugins are your next step to add additional functions to make your site work the way you want it to. You’ll find lots more information in our Plugins Toolkit including our recommendations.
9. Create your own time machine document – This will possibly be the most useful advice you will ever read regarding your own website, especially if you use plugins.  Benefit from my experience:

   A few years ago I spent weeks researching and learning how to master a complicated plugin, but two years later I needed to makes changes to it and couldn’t remember how I did it, so scratching my head I went back through the same Google searches as before only to find a random WordPress forum where 2 years earlier I had already posted the solution for others who were experiencing the same problem! It was a bizarre moment, like talking to myself but it led to the creation of my own time machine document in which I now make notes on everything to do with a website in one huge Word doc which means I can simply search my own past work, for my own answers when I’ve forgotten something useful.

   Regard it as a how-to document showing a complete newbie how to manage your website because when you forget something, you will feel like a newb…This will also help in the event that should something go wrong, you’ll have your time machine guide to help you pin point the last changes you made and work out what caused a conflict. Because plugins can cause conflicts! 

The Next Step 

Now you have your own unique site, you can head over to the New Website Handbook which will walk you through all the initial steps you need once these basics are set up.