How to make a professional WordPress website in 2020
See I’ve personally been using WordPress for over 7 years now, and I decided to make this WordPress tutorial for beginners, to show you everything you’ll need to know in order to build a website you can be proud of! You don’t need to have any previous design skills. We won’t be using any coding. And it’s only going to take us about 45 minutes to complete!
So if you need a website for an online business you’re starting or maybe you just want to build a website for fun.
This is how you do it. I’m going to walk you through the entire process, step by step, and in a way that anyone should be able to understand. You should still have no problems building this website. But rather than just talking about it. Let’s take a look at the actual website we’ll be building. So I’m going to show you how to add a logo and a header image here at the top and how to change our site colors.
Then we’ll also cover how to create different pages, which we’ll add to our menu, and these pages will have text, images, and anything else we might need. We’ll also be adding a form to our contact page as well, so our visitors can send us a message if they need to. Then the website we’re building is also going to have a blog.
Where our posts will have these awesome featured images. And when we click into them, we’ll have our text, images, and any other content we add. And then here at the bottom we’ll also have a comments section where our visitors can leave us a reply. Then, we’ll also be covering how to change the WordPress sidebar, which is this part that runs down the right hand side of our pages. And we can add things like images, text, and lists of our recent blog posts. This website’s also going to be 100% mobile friendly, which means it’s going to look amazing on ANY device.
So if I just make this window a little smaller we can see what our website will look like on a tablet. Then if we make it a little smaller again, this is what our website’s going to look like when being viewed on a mobile phone. So no matter what device it’s being viewed on, it’s always going to look great.
Now you’re probably not going to be building a website about coffee like my example site. But don’t worry; this is going to work for almost any kind of business, or website you might need. So here’s the same website with different images, and branding to give you an idea of what I mean. And as you can see, the website’s pretty much always going to look great!
Customize WordPress
So if you’re ready to get started, this is how to make a professional WordPress website, step by step, in 2020.
And that’s because we’re going to be using WordPress.org. This is the same platform used by companies like Forbes, CNN, and Sony just to name a few. And not only that, but WordPress is also super easy to use. In fact, there are only 5 main steps we’ll need to follow, in order to build a professional website with WordPress. So the first thing we need to do is setup a web hosting account for our site. And this is basically where the different files that make our website will be stored online. So people can gain access to our site, even when our own computer’s switched off. Web hosting is something we will require in order to run a website, and it’ll usually cost us around 8-12 dollars a month.
A domain name is basically the title of our website, with WWW. Before it and .com after it, and it’s what we type into our internet browser to visit a specific website. So for example, Google’s domain name is www.google.com. Once again, a domain name is something we will require in order to run a website, and will usually cost us around $13 a year. So we pay for our web hosting once a month, and then we pay for our domain name once a year.
Then once we have our domain name and web hosting, we can move on to the next step, which is installing WordPress. This will only take about 60 seconds or so for us to do. And as WordPress is open source software, it’s also 100% free for us to use.
Then once we’ve installed WordPress, we’re going to move on to the fourth step, which is choosing and customizing a WordPress theme. This is going to change the entire look for our WordPress site and make it more like the website we’re trying to build. And then the last thing we need to do is add our different content, which will basically be the main pages that make up our website.
You could be things like an about page and a contact page. Now I will also cover a few other bits and pieces as well as we go along, but these really are the five main steps we need to follow in order to build a professional WordPress website.
As we can see the first things we need to do are set up web hosting and get a domain name for our website. And lucky for us we can get both of from the same place, which is a website called zolahost.com.
And this is a company I’ve been using for years now without any problems. They’re a great at low cost hosting company, which is exactly what we want. And they are also who I currently use to host tamilneithal.com. So if you’re going to take my recommendation, we just need to open up our internet browser and go to zolahost.com. Then if we click web hosting at the top, this is going to show us different hosting plans they offer. If you’re only planning to build one website like I am, we can go for the advanced plan. Or if you’re going to be building more than one website, go for the unlimited plan.
We probably won’t need when just getting started. So really it’s between the advance plan and the unlimited plan. Then once we’ve decided on which plan we’re going to go for, we can just click buy now.
That’s going to bring us to this page where we’re going to enter whatever we’d like to use as our domain name into this box. And then choose our domain extension on the right and then choose .com as my domain extension. Then underneath we’ll see it says domain privacy protection and this is a 100% optional add on. I normally just uncheck this box myself and haven’t had any problems to date. But if you want to keep the box checked, you can and it’ll be added to your bill. Then underneath it says choose a hosting plan and here we just want to double check that our package type is correct and choose a billing cycle.
At the start I chose the advanced plan, so this is correct. And then here we can choose how often we’d like to pay for our hosting, we can pay for every six months. Or we can even pay for it every three years if we like. Now we do see a bit more money than longer.
Then under this we can enter our personal billing information, so that’s things like our name, our email address and things like that. And on the right hand side we can choose how we would like to pay for our order and we can choose either credit or debit card or PayPal. Then under this we’ll see it says add additional services. And these are just a few paid add on’s that zolahost.com offer. If you’re lucky, there’s still going to be running this offer where we get a free SSL certificate, which is pretty awesome.
Then underneath it says enter a coupon code and I have a coupon to share with you guys. That’ll get us our web hosting for only one penny. So there might already be a coupon entered in here worth 25% off our order. But instead of using this coupon, we’re just going to delete it and instead enter 25FORALL.
All one word 25FORALL. Then when we click the validate button, we’ll see that we’re now getting our 25% Offer.
Also be sure to note the 30 day money back guarantee and the 24/7 phone live chat and email support, which can be extremely helpful if we get stuck. Now, I do just want to mention that as well as you getting an amazing price on your hosting.
I finished paying for my order it brought me a thank you page and then redirected me to the home page. So if you’re following along at home, at this point we just want to open up our email inbox in a new tab. And here we should find a few new emails from zolahost.com. These are pretty important emails so we need to keep them safe.
But for now we just want to click into the one labeled your contact info. And this email will have a link to our control panel, our username and password for logging in and some other pretty important information. So now I would just need to click the link to your control panel, which is going to open up our c panel login screen in a new tab. And then we’re just going to copy and paste our username and password from this email into the c panel login screen. Then we just need to click login and this is us going to be logging into the zolahost.com c panel.
Now this seems a little overwhelming at first, but it’s actually pretty easy. All we need to do is scroll down to where it says software and then click WordPress. And Install now. Then if we click one click installs on the left and select WordPress in the middle, that’s going to bring us to this page. And here we just need to select our new domain name from this drop down list and then click next and on this page we’re just going to enter some basic information for our new WordPress website. So for blog title, this is just going to be the name of our website and for me I’m going to type my new website. Although don’t worry too much about the name for now as we can always change it again later than augment users. Going to be the username for logging into your site and it’s also going to be visible on a few of our pages as well.
Then, we just need to enter our first name, our last name and our email address. Then underneath we just need to check this box. Do you agree to the terms of service and then click install. zolahost.com is then going to install WordPress for us automatically in a matter of seconds and once it’s finished we’ll be given a link to our site, our user name and a randomly generated password for logging in. So at this point we just want to right click the login button and click open link in new tab. This is then going to open up our WordPress login screen in a new tab. Although don’t be alarmed if you’re just showing a blank white screen or some kind of advert. Sometimes it can take a few minutes for everything to be ready. So if this happens to you, just take a quick break and then try again soon.
But once we see the log in screen, we just want to copy and paste our username and password from this screen into the log in screen. Then when we click log in, this is us going to be logging into what’s known as the WordPress dashboard, which is where we can add any content or make any changes to our new website, which by the way is now live online.
All we need to do to visit our website is click our site title in the top left. And that’s going to show us what WordPress looks like when we first install it. Now, yours might look a little different to, sometimes they change up the default theme.