How do you start blog? First you would have to decide what your blog is going to be about. It is important step, because the blog would require time and efforts. You should consider your occupation and your hobbies, because usually people blog about something that they know well. For example: if you are a Realtor, you can start blog about Real Estate or you can start food blog, if you like to cook and take pictures of the food. At this point you should also decide why you want to start blog. Is it simply because you have interest in the subject or the main purpose of your blog is strictly to make money or at least to get some potential customers for your business. In any case your blog should be about something that you know and like.
After you decide on the subject of your blog, the next step is to choose domain name and domain extension. All my domain are .com domains and for vast majority of blogs .com is the best extension. Domain's name is important. You would want domain's name that is easy to remember and easy to spell. Ideally, domain's name should be no more than 3 words and no longer than 15 characters, not counting the extension. The shorter name is better than longer name. You would want domain's name to reflect subject of your blog. Many good short domain's names are already taken, so to find good domain's name may not be an easy task. It is helpful to get some keywords into your domain's name, even more so if you are planning to get paid traffic. I buy my domains from GoDaddy, but you can use any domain name Registrar that you like.
If all good short domain's names are already taken, should you buy good domain from current domain's owner? That is not an easy question to answer. If you want to start blog just because you like to blog, I would say no, but if the main purpose of your blog is to to get customers for your business or monetize your blog in some other way, I would say probably yes, if the asking price is not too high.
Next you should choose software for your blog. Wordpress would be my first recommendation. It is most widely used blogging platform. I mean the Wordpress CMS that you download from Wordpress.org and install on your web server. Next step you would need web server and for that you would need to choose web hosting type and web hosting provider.
Shared Hosting is the cheapest hosting that you can get. Some of the cheap shared hosting plans cost just few dollars a month. Shared Hosting as the name implies, means that there are many websites on the same server. It has negative affect on the website performance and performance is very important factor for any website. Another problem with Shared Hosting, that many web hosts would limit, how much RAM (memory) and CPU your website can use. Most of the time they do not tell you that upfront, but then they give you the warning about the CPU and RAM overage (excessive use). Though, they often advertise unlimited traffic and unlimited hard drive space, that is usually simply not true. I would not recommend this type of hosting, if you want your website to make money or to get you customers.
Next type of hosting for Wordpress websites is managed Wordpress Hosting. It is hosting that is optimized for Wordpress websites. It is more expensive than regular shared hosting, but managed Wordpress hosting has many advantages. This type of hosting make it very easy to install and update Wordpress websites. These hosting plans come with their own caching plugins, performance enhancements, security features and automatic daily backups. These web hosts limit plugins, that you can use, to avoid conflict with features, they include with hosting plans, so make sure to check the list of plugins, the web host would not allow. If you want to start blog with Wordpress and you want to do as little website and web server administration as possible, it is very good choice, but look at the number of websites, disk space and web traffic included with web hosting plan.
Other hosting type that you can use is VPS hosting. It has a lots less websites on one server than shared hosting and provide much better security than shared hosting and it gives you a lot more control over web server and your website. If it is true VPS hosting, the hosting plan should clearly state how much RAM and CPU resources you would get. It should says something like: 2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB disk space (it means hard drive space) and the amount of traffic to your website per month. The traffic could be unlimited or it could have limit set in GBs or in number of visitors (in thousands). Please note that plans, that say equal share of CPU or RAM, are not true VPS hosting plans. That could cause overage warning just like with Shared Hosting. The price for such plans should be below true VPS hosting plans, but higher than Shared Hosting.
Another factor to consider when you choose web hosting is an e-mail service. Some web hosts include e-mail with hosting plan and some do not. If you want to send e-mails to your readers from your website, then you would need e-mail service included with hosting plan. Your other option is to use third party service to send e-mails. Also please note that hosting plan could have a limit on the number of e-mails that you can send a day from your website.
Another very important factor to consider is uptime. Uptime is the time when web server is up and running and your website is online and you want it to be as close to 100% as possible, so it is very important to get web host with very good uptime.
At the top of the hosting types is dedicated server. You get the whole server to yourself. It is most expensive option, but the most secure one and the one that gives you total control over web server. It also requires skills from server administrator. It is not something that I would recommend for beginners.
As you can see Web Hosting plan and host's uptime is very important, so make sure to choose good web host and good web hosting plan.
Now you are ready to install Wordpress on you server. It is easy thing to do and takes just few minutes. Next you should install a theme. Wordpress comes with default theme, but you do not want you blog look like thousands of other websites. There are about 4000 free themes on Wordpress.org website. On each theme's page you can see the ratings and number of active installations. I would suggest that you choose themes with good ratings and at least 10000+ active installations. The higher active installation numbers are even better, because Wordpress depends on the theme do display site's content, so choosing quality theme is important when you start blog with Wordpress.
By now you have Wordpress and theme installed and you can start blogging. I would suggest that you install few plugins to improve your blog.
Many Wordpress plugins are available in both free and premium versions. I suggest that you start with free versions of these plugins.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin is strongly recommended. There are two excellent SEO plugins for Wordpress. They greatly improve SEO of your blog. Please choose one of them:
1. Yoast SEO
Wordpress comes with Gutenberg as default editor. It is actually editor and page builder in one. I do not like it in its current state, although it may improve in the future. So I recommend that you install:
and use it instead of Gutenberg.
I also recommend that you install:
It extends and enhances the Classic Editor.
I think that it is really a required minimum to start blog with Wordpress, but depending your blog you may want to add more features to your blog. To do that you would need to install additinal plugins to extend functionality of your Wordpress blog.
If you want to completely disable Gutenberg editor and hide all traces of it, you can install:
There many contact form plugins, that you may want to install, if you want your visitors to contact you. There are two plugins, that are most that I like most:
Option one:
if you install Contact form 7, I also recommend that you install:
Flamingo is message storage plugin for Contact Form 7 plugin. Contact Form 7 itself does not sore submitted messages.
Option two:
Another one widely used contact form plugin is:
Other plugins are mostly optional, if you want to start blog with Wordpress. Caching, performance, backup and security plugins are provided with most of the managed Wordpress hosting plans. Other plugins that you may need are picture gallery and slide show plugins.
For picture gallery I recommend:
and for slideshow:
or
I would like to say few words about page builders. They are very useful, if you want to build few pages. I use them for landing pages. They should not be used for articles.
There are two page builders, that I like most:
and
Another good page builder is:
There are also commercial page builders, although I do not think that you need them to start blog with Wordpress.
As you can see, it is not very difficult to create a simple blog with Wordpress and start blogging. If you want to start blog with Wordpress, because you like to blog, it can be DIY project. On the other hand, if your goal is to bring customers to your business or make money with your website, then it gets more complicated, because look and feel of the website, its features and performance, become much more important. That is why I said at the beginning of this article, that you should decide on your goals early on, because that would affect design and features of your website and very importantly web hosting, required to run it.
I hope, that you find this information useful and be well on the way to start blog with Wordpress. If you decide to hire a developer, please contact me and I will gladly build website for you. In any case have fun and happy blogging!