Are you new to website building? Many people don’t understand WordPress and that is what this article is here for.
This article is here to help you to learn more about WordPress and hosting. In this article, I will even help you to bring your website to life today!
- WordPress does not host your website.
Over 10 years ago, WP started as a blogging platform so technically WordPress can host your blog, but it’s not meant for that. WordPress is a free and open source website building platform. Back in the days you had to be a programmer to create a site, but now all that you will need is WordPress.
2. Sites can be hosted on WordPress.com
You must realize that there is a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org which I will talk about below. However, for now let me explain a little about the .com version. WordPress.com is basically the free WordPress (Not recommended for professionals or those who want to make money blogging.)
With free WordPress, your site is hosted on their servers which means they own your content. At any moment, you can be terminated if you even accidentally break their TOS which does happen. It is foolish and irresponsible for any business to be hosted on someone else’s servers.
Another drawback of hosting your website on WP.com is that your site address will use a WordPress.com subdomain such as myblog.wordpress.com.
Hosting with WordPress.com gives them the ability to do whatever they want to your blog such as implement ads which can be annoying and costly for your site.
3. WordPress also has a WordPress Premium option.
In all honesty, I find WordPress Premium to be stupid. Here is why. Premium does not offer the same features and it costs $99. Only a beginner blogger would pay $99 to upgrade to WordPress Premium. It is wiser to host your own site. When you host your own site, you will be able to have all of the WordPress features such as over 40K plugins to immediately enhance your blog.
On the WordPress.com website. They boast about how this plan is for entrepreneurs and freelancers. You will be able to build a unique website with advanced design tools, CSS editing, lots of space for audio and video, and you can monetize your site with ads.
They forget to mention about their small theme library and how you will most likely have to pay for more themes. They forget to mention that upgrading to Premium still does not make a difference for your TOS. Your TOS will remain the same which makes this an awful platform for entrepreneurs.
4. WordPress.org is what you want.
WP.org is also known as the self-hosted WordPress. With this option, your site is actually going to be your site. You will not have to worry about having an ugly URL structure for your domain. You can easily add CSS codes. This option is not available when you host your website through the .com version.
The last thing I want to talk about is your search engine presence. With WP.org you can actually rank high on Google. It is almost impossible to rank well for keywords if you choose the free hosted option or any free hosted option.
Rule #1 of blogging, don’t set yourself up for failure. If you’re not ranking well your only hope would be social media traffic which is an awful business plan.
5. How to host your WordPress website?
You need a web hosting company. Web hosting is different from a site builder but to make a website work, you will need both. Find a hosting company that will host your WordPress website for you such as SiteGround.
SiteGround has the fastest load speeds and highest customer satisfaction rating out of all shared hosting providers. Once you sign up with SiteGround install WordPress and it’s as simple as that.
That’s all it took for me to have a website and now I have various websites. What makes SiteGround so great is that they were specifically built for WordPress. SG uses a preinstall feature to complete the installation without you having to do a thing.
Why wait? Let’s create a website right now. (3 min setup.)
1. Sign up for their WordPress hosting package – SiteGround gives you a free website domain for life.
2. When you finally arrive at the Customer Area you will see a popup that starts telling you about their preinstall Wizard.
3. Click on get WordPress preinstalled on this account and then click on the proceed button.
4. Next choose your new WordPress login details.
5. Next choose your site theme. (Can be changed for thousands of WordPress themes.) You don’t have to worry about the theme that you choose.
6. You just completed your site setup and now you’re set to take over the online world!