How To Setup A Blog In WordPress?

If you want to set up a blog in WordPress and want to create a successful career in blogging you can follow this detailed guide about setting up a blog in WordPress.

Blogging has been one of the most powerful jobs in this present century. Anyone around the globe, who wants to create an online presence, whether it’s been his/her passion about something or want to promote any brand, content is the foremost thing.

In this article, I will describe how to set up a blog in the most powerful platform WordPress. Let’s begin with the very basic steps.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most common and popular CMS or Content Management System. There are over 40% of all the websites on the Internet powered by WordPress. Actually, more than one in four websites are likely powered by WordPress.

On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system that anyone can use or modify for free.

In any content management system, no programming or coding is required. It is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website without needing to know anything about programming.

Anyone from any background,  not being versatile in technology, can use it for any website.

Usually, WordPress is used to build any website, blog or eCommerce site, resume, portfolio, or any social media site. It consists of a large theme store, which anyone can use to change the appearance of a site, or one of the biggest plugin repositories, which are used to increase the functionalities of any site.

Which WordPress to use to set up a blog in WordPress

WordPress has two very different platforms, one is Wordpress.com & the other one is Wordpress.org.

• org, is a self-hosted WordPress, a free, open-source WordPress software that anyone can install on his/her own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own.
• com is a pro?t based paid service that is powered by the WordPress.org software. It’s simple to use as a self-hosted WordPress, but much less ?exible than the self-hosted WordPress.

People actually mean to say the self-hosted WordPress available at WordPress.org, when they say about “WordPress”. Self-hosted WordPress.org is almost always the best option for creating a website.

How to install WordPress?

WordPress is a multifunctional open-source platform. Anyone can download the latest version of WordPress right from the o?cial website. The downloadable versions are available in both windows & Linux and Mac versions.

After downloading the requisite ?le you need to install it. To set up a WordPress blog a proper hosting platform is needed. One can install it after buying a paid hosting package available in the market or can also install it on a local computer, like in MAMP/XAMP/Localhost.

Before setting up the WordPress blog accessible to people around the world, anyone needs to ?nd out about the hosting domain.

• Hosting – Hosting means actually the web authority of a site on the web This is the engine that powers a site, in fact, on the Internet every site has a host powering it.
• Domain – This is like a permanent address like a house. Suppose if any user is looking for a website like “www.example.com”, - then he needs to ?nd out a good name for his site.

For paid hosting, anyone can look for the options available on the internet, some of which are Hostinger, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, WP Engine.

Before making a purchase of any web hosting service, anyone needs to compare with the plans and pricing available on each hosting provider. My personal recommendation in Reseller Club for beginners, whether anybody can look for other hostings as well.

To install WordPress, a user needs to create a proper database location, where he needs to keep all his ?les, in the MySQL database. Here he will create a new database user, setting up the database name, username & password.

After that, he needs to con?gure the wp-con?g-sample. PHP ?le in the ?le manager. After logging in through the cPanel, a user can ?nd the wp-con?g-sample. PHP under the public.html, where he needs to put the database name, username, and password he has created on the database.

After editing the wp-con?g-sample. PHP ?le, the user needs to access the wp-admin/install.php depending upon the URL of the site then he needs to select the language and the admin ID/password & email address on the WordPress site which used to keep remembered for further use. This is how the ?rst appearance will look like.

How to set up a blog in WordPress?

After installing WordPress, a user needs to change the appearance and the functionalities of the website to set up a blog in WordPress. Themes can change the appearance of the site. In the appearance section, he can ?nd the theme section, where he can access all the necessary themes available in the WordPress store.

Usually, by default, the theme Twenty-Twentyone is installed on a new site and three themes, twenty-nineteen, twenty-twenty, and twenty-twentyone are installed for further use in the theme section.

Depending on the niche user can select the theme. Astra is a widely popular WordPress theme used for any purpose, where according to the niche separate sections are available and the user can ?x it on his choice.

The user must be careful about changing the theme and he needs to take a backup of the site before installing a new theme. In the menu section, he can create new menus and dropdowns on the site he used to provide. He can also select the speci?c page and sections he can use to appear in the menu section.

Word press plugins are used to increase the functionality of the website. On using the ?rst time it’s very confusing to use which kind of plugins is to use and which gives what kind of functionality. Very few important plugins and their usage are described here.

1. Elementor Page Builder: In WordPress sites, Elementor is the most commonly used page builder, and it's also very feasible to set up a blog in WordPress. In Elementor users can simply drag and drop sections to add multiple sections to a particular page. Using the Astra theme one can import a page block by searching on the Astra directory and then he can design it.

Users can import as many blocks in a particular on his/her choice, where they can put an image, any video, any text content, any button, a form, or any map to point to a location.

Anytime he will update the content of the page he needs to update it to save it and can see the changes by refreshing the page.

2. WP ?le manager: This is a very important plugin for any WordPress site. If a user wants to access all the backend ?les, he can do so using this ?le. Here he can access the public_html folder, there are three most important subfolders wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes. Using these three subfolders from time to time he can access, edit and change necessary ?les of his site.

3. All in One WP Migration: If you want to build any site on a temporary hosting package and want to move it to another hosting or after building up a local server, to make the website live, all you need to export the previously built site and then import on the later.

Using this plugin you can export the ?le locally on your device as .wpress ?les, then you import it on the live server. To import the site, all you need to increase the import size.

The minimum import size is 64MB, which is to be increased according to the need of the user. By two ways anyone can increase the import size. He can access the wp-con?g.php ?le where he needs to edit the ini ?le using the shortcode snippet provided in the support section of the plugin or he can edit the .htaccess ?le using the same short code snippet.

4. Site Kit By Google: This is a very important plugin, developed by Google, where users can use very important google integration. Here he can access google search console, google analytics, and google AdSense the three major Google integration used to the site performance, and placing an advertisement on google.

5. Google Analytics Monsterinsights: If a user wants to track his site performance and user engagement, then he must use Google From Google analytics o?cial he can track the site performance, but when he wants to see this on WordPress site, he can install monster insights plugin, by which he can see the site performance and no of user engagements.

6. Security Plugin: Any user must want to secure his site from unwanted virus attacks and enable malware protection. On a WordPress site, there are plugins by which he can do so. Sucuri Security & Malcare are the two most used security plugins for WordPress, any of which can be used.

7. a3 lazyload: If you want to build your site for device-friendly purposes, then you must create a responsive design as well as look for the mobile page speed. As most of us use mobile more than any electronic gadgets.

a3 Lazy Load is a very simple Mobile-Oriented plugin that will speed up sites page load speed. The plugin performs better with more content-heavy sites and the improvements in performance will be seen clearly.

8. AMP for WP: AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. This plugin automatically adds AMP functionality to the WordPress site. It makes a website faster for Mobile visitors.

9. Autoptimize: Autoptimize makes optimizing sites really easy. This speci?c plugin mini?es the cache scripts and styles, and injects CSS in the page head. It can also inject inline critical CSS and moves the aggregated full CSS, defers scripts to the footer, and mini?es HTML.

Lazy-load images (with support for WebP and AVIF formats), Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, can also be optimized with this plugin. There is an extensive API available to use Autoptimize on each and every site’s speci?c needs.

10. Broken Link Checker: Broken links always make a negative impression on a site and create a bad user experience. Any user can check the broken links on his site using this plugin and can take the necessary actions.

11. Smush: Large images make a site heavier to load on any device. Anyone needs to optimize those images to increase site speed. Using this plugin he can optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve Google Page Speed. Smush always compresses images without a visible drop in quality & it is the easiest way to make a site load super fast!

12. Updraftplus: Any user needs to back up his site anytime before any major upload or changes. Updraftplus is a plugin that simpli?es backups and restoration.

It is the most popular scheduled backup plugin in the WordPress repository. Backup the ?les and database into cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible),

UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email and restore them with a single click!!

13. Litespeed cache: LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is a site acceleration plugin,  featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features. It supports multi-site integrations and is compatible with the most popular plugins,   including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO.

14. SEO Plugins: If a user is fond of blogging then he must be familiar with SEO. In any WordPress site, SEO is done by using plugins. There are three famous SEO plugins, Yoast SEO, Rankmath & All in One SEO. Among these Yoast SEO is the most popular one and also the best plugging to set up a blog in WordPress.

 Website response codes are also a very important factor.  There  are  numerous  website  response  codes,  named 1xx,2xx,3xx,4xx & 5xx codes.

Out of this 404 & 403 codes are important and they give a pretty bad user experience and termed as broken links. Using 301 redirects anyone can redirect any 404/403 error link 301 redirections to avoid broken links of the site.

Although there are more plugins available in the directory to check and use, these are the most basic ones which anyone needs to build any WordPress site for the ?rst time.

To increase the functionalities and the appearance of the site user can use any other paid themes from ThemeForest or any other site. Using the theme editor & CSS ?les the site appearance can be changed.

But must be careful to change the appearance as any mistake will damage the site. In the setting option and tools section, the entire site would import and export as an XML ?le.

In the reading section the site name, the web address, the time zone settings all need to be changed before making the site public. In the user section, the site admin can add multiple public as their roles on the site. The plugins and themes are updated from time to time.

Users must be careful and wisely update those. Apart from these themes & plugins, the WordPress versions also update and the user must take a backup of his entire site before updating the WordPress versions

This is the entire process described here on how to set up a blog in WordPress. I hope this step-by-step guide will help anyone to set up his blog and run it.