How to Start A WordPress Blog For Free in 8 Simple Steps?

 1. Choose a WordPress Blog Niche

The initial and foremost step of ” How to start a WordPress blog?” is to decide your WordPress Blog Niche. You are free to choose whatever blog Niche you are interested in.

The Niche should not be chosen as per the current trend or what other successful bloggers are into. But it should be something that you would love to explore, learn and interested in.

To make an easy selection of WordPress blog niche for you, We have provided some of the most popular blog categories, that will help you to get an idea about how vast are the opportunities are.

Some of the most popular Niche are:

1. Lifestyle
2. Art + DIY
3. News
4. Business & Finance
5. Entertainment
6. Food
7. Tech
8. Science
9. Product Reviews and many more.

These are only a few blog categories or niches that gained huge popularity, But there are many more exist. Even, you cannot imagine how many different types of sub-niche present within the same Parent niche. For example, in the Health niche, you can choose Health, Nutrition, Fashion, Travel, Beauty, Parenting, Fitness, Bodybuilding, Weightloss and many more.

Choosing a particular niche is not about just picking a topic and start writing content on it. It will decide how your blog will Target a specific type of audience who are interested in that particular niche. For example, Bodybuilding and Fitness both share the same ideology but the blog contents and theme will be completely different.

However, whatever you chose as a Blog topic, you are free to extend or spread your views in another area of interest as well. You are not bound to produce content around the chosen niche only. It is better to choose and try any blog topic and see which blog topic you are feeling interested in.

2. Research and Decide Domain Name

Having your own domain name for your WordPress blog is one of the basic and most important things for a website. It is so important that your whole brand reputation, Web traffic, Search result optimization (SEO) depends on it. You cannot select any random name prior to keyword research and analysis.

For a best domain name you must check these qualities to get a better visibility online.

1. Do keyword research around the niche.
2. Try to choose a name from the keyword or names around it which has high search volume and low competition.
3. If keywords are unavailable you can choose Your own name and link it with your niche to make a Brand out of it. It is called Self Branding. The domain name should be of your name and niche, the tone you use for writing and the theme you choose that defines your personality.
4. Always give priority to the “.com” domain.
5. The name should be easy to remember and pronounce.
6. Make it as short, if possible make it to one word

The whole buying and registering of a domain name will depend on availability and seller. But on average, it will cost you around $10- $20 per year/domain.

3. Select hosting service Provider – WPOven makes it easy!

After registering your Domain name, now it is time to buy a Web hosting service. It can be understood as, If the domain name is your home address, then the Web hosting is the home you are living in, where you host your all website contents.

These hosting providers are one of those, who have the power to make your website accessible for users. However, there are a number of web hosting services available now. But the main concern is to choose the right one.

Without second thought WPOven is one of the best Web hosting service provider that you can trust upon. We have servers and data centers with dedicated hotspots around the World that keep your blog connected to the internet all the time.

Some of the key Features of WPOven are :

And Plans starting at $16.61 per month. It is one of the lowest and best plans for anyone who likes to start their WordPress blog.

4. Setup your Website on WordPress

Done with your domain name and buying WPOven web hosting service? Now it is time to get into details on How to start a WordPress blog? But before that you should know how to set up WordPress on your web hosting first. Check out the step by step process mentioned below:

In the First step of setup, You need to go WPOven homepage.

Sign Up a Free account on WPOven.com

In the first step of website setup, you need to visit WPOven Homepage, and click on the Sign UP button as shown in the picture below:

Once, you click on Sign Up button a Sign UP form appear asking your important credentials such as:

1. Your name
2. Email address
3. Password

Check the terms and conditions button and hit the Sign UP Now button to complete registration. An verification email will be sent to your registered email id. You have to open your email box and click on the verification email to verify it.

After you done with your verification, it is time to choose your hosting plan. Go to back to the Homepage and click on “Plans And Features” button as shown in the image.

A page with detailed plans and Features will appear. Read thoroughly and check out the complete details that best suitable for your requirements. To choose a suitable starting plan we will recommend you to go for a very basic one. Once you, start growing and getting traffic, you can move on to higher plans. At WPOven, we take care of every user and we have plans for everyone, from users who like to have a website for their hobbies or for running an Agency.

The basic at WPOven starts at $16.67 a month, especially focuses on users who want a website as their hobby or newbies who were for How to start a WordPressl blog just like you. To continue with the process, click on the “Order now” button and complete the payment.

How to add your Domain to WPOven

After you are done with buying Web hosting service, Now it is time to Set up your Domain Name on your Web hosting service. Just check out the “How To Add Your Domains to WPOven” setup tutorial. It will really help you to get through this.

5. WordPress Installation and other settings

The above two starting Hosting plans are enough to fulfill your requirements and we highly recommend beginners to choose from. After, you have selected and bought the most suitable plan, all you need to install WordPress CMS for your website. But at WPOven, you do not need to install WordPress manually. You will have the latest version of WordPress pre-installed.

However, if you are using any other or different host, you will need to manually download WordPress and install it.

After successfully installing WordPress on your website. You need to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard by heading over the link https://www.yourdomain.com/wp-logi or admin. A login page will open on a tab and asking for the username/email and password, that you have generated while setting up Your hosting account.

WordPress is an open-source platform and hence it is one of the most flexible and customizable CMS available. Due to its flexibility, you can also customize your admin login page. you can also read our guide on “How to change your default WordPress Login Url“.

After successfully login to your website admin page. A WordPress dashboard will open showing all the necessary options and website settings. You can hover over all the Menu buttons on the left side bar of the WordPress Dashboard to check their options.

You found there are too many options are there, but you need to know only some of the important settings at the initial stage. Let us figure out them.

WordPress general settings

The first and most important step is to change the General Settings of the website. On this page, you will be required to enter your Website “Title”, your website Tagline, WordPress Address URL and other settings. However, there are no restrictions on changing these settings at any time. But it is always recommended to have a website Tagline to let your visitors know what is your motto or aim of the website. And the Title of your Website will help in Branding.

Writing WordPress Settings

After changing, General settings of WordPress, now head over to Writing Settings, which is present below the General settings button. In Writing settings, you can set the default post category and default post format for your posts. However, this step is not so much important though. You can change these settings whenever you want even after pushing some content on your website.

Reading WordPress Settings

Now you have done with changing writing settings, Now move on to change Reading settings. Depending on the WordPress theme you are using, the fields in reading settings may be a little different. But most of them will have an option to choose how your homepage display shows to your readers, Decide the number of Blog pages, Encourage or Discourage Search Engine indexing, etc.

Note: We highly recommend you discourage search engines from indexing the site, before completion of Website designing and start pushing articles on the website. It is because an incomplete website with no posts will create a negative impact on search engines and it will affect SEO.

Discussion WordPress Settings

The discussion settings page contains all the settings related to the post comments and their moderation. This settings page will allow you to restrict spammers or bots, that try to spam your comment section with irrelevant links or advertising. Initially, your main consideration should be to restrict random users to comment or the comments must be approved manually.

Media WordPress Settings

WordPress also gives users a media settings option to customize the size and width of thumbnails or images you upload. You can leave it as it is or define pre-set size media configuration for the posts.

Permalinks Settings

Permalinks are the permanent links that appear on the address bar of the browser, whenever a visitor visits any page of the website. It is the combination of your domain name with the page name. To get a better idea, let us take an example of the permalink of a post ” https://www.wpoven.com/blog/how-to-start-a-travel-blog/“. Here WPOven is the domain name and blog/how-to-start-a-travel-blog is the link associated with it, i.e its permalink of the post.

In permalinks settings, you have an option to select and customize your permalink format in Day and name, Month and name, Numeric, Post name, Custom structure or you can leave it as plain. WordPress uses plain format by default which cannot be read easily and looks weird. Hence, from the SEO point of view, It is highly recommended to use post names in permalink format.

Note: Always try to use your Focus keyword in the slug, that will help to boost your SEO. Another point you must note that, once you have selected your permalink format and executed it. You cannot change it afterwards, if you try to do so, it is possible that the link can be broken and show a 404 error page.

Set your User Profile

After making some changes and setting up WordPress General Settings, the other settings you should also look into is your User Profile. To edit your user profile, hover over the Users menu button and click on the Your profile option.

Sometimes the various user information fields as shown in the picture above, are by default filled by themes. Hence, it is very important to make ensure each and every detail of the User profile is filled correctly. Also check, whether the “Display name publicly as” showing correct drop-down options or not.

At the bottom of the user profile settings page, Complete your Gravatar profile, which will help you in posting articles or posts on any WordPress website easily.

6. Select a Theme that matches your Blog Niche

To begin an easy start, you can choose default WordPress themes, which have a clean and very basic design. Or if you want to go fancy, it is better to choose a perfect theme that matched your Blog niche. However, you must make things clear in your mind that, choosing a theme for your blog is not that more important than the contents you will be pushing. Hence, you must focus on your quality of content rather than the theme design and looks. Once you are able to attract a satisfactory audience base, then you can consider the theme of your blog.

There are many directories are available on the web form where you can select and buy the most suitable theme that matches your blog niche and requirements. One of the most popular theme directories is Themeforest. It has millions of themes for all types of niches at a minimal cost.

Some Free and paid themes available to download from WordPress directory:

However, apart from being free and easily available on the WordPress directory, you might want to switch to a theme with a more beautiful design and features at some point in time. In that situation, to make the whole theme switching process easy, you need to add a new theme via, navigating to the Appearance section of the WordPress sidebar. Click on the Themes proceeded by clicking on the “Add new” button to upload a new theme. Once, you successfully upload theme files, install and activate them. Now you are done, and ready to provide a fresh, featureful and new look of your blog to your visitors.

Some Premium Blog themes on Themeforest

You can easily search any type of Blog theme in the search bar of the ThemeForest website and can filter the list by best match, Trending, Best rated, price, etc.

7. Install Recommended Plugins

After installing the theme successfully on your website, another most important step is to install some plugins. However, it is not a difficult task to install multiple plugins on your website, before pushing any content. But the main problem is that installing plugins unnecessarily can slows down your website and degrades the overall website experience.

One thing, you should keep in mind that, you do not need any plugins to start a blog, WordPress has built-in all the essential features and functionalities that will be required to run a blog. But enhance the overall experience and squeeze out the best of your blog, usually, we need to install some most essential plugins.

To make an easy process for you, we have provided some of the best and most essential plugins for the blog to start with:

These essential plugins are free to install and use, and can be easily downloaded from the WordPress directory.

To download and install a plugin, You need to go to the ‘Plugins’ section in your admin panel. Search for the ‘Name of plugin’ and click on the ‘Install Now’ button. This way, the plugin will be successfully installed on your WordPress; after installing, press the ‘Activate’ button beside the plugin.

Now the plugin has been successfully installed and activated on your blog and it is ready to go.

RankMath (SEO plugin)

To get consistent organic traffic on search engines, there are multiple parameters of SEO to be fulfilled. Hence, SEO is one of the most common sources of traffic for many websites. Although, you can easily reach the top ranks of SERPs with the help of SEM, where you have to bid some amount for the better position.

Whereas, in SEO, all your traffic will be based on your optimization and quality of content. The better optimization and content you provide, the greater will be the chances to get top ranks. But, there are a lot of things that need to be optimized for search engines, it can be tedious for anyone rather than writing content.

To make things easy and fast, Rank Math SEO is one of the best choices for SEO for your website. Its excellent feature provides you top-notch SEO capabilities that were not easy to do previously. Its Automation features have the potential to do the task of the entire SEO team in just a few steps.

Askimet – Protect from spams

Spammers or Spam comments can be a potential threat to your blog and can hack your website. Hence you need to take necessary measures to restrict their passage to your blog. There are many WordPress plugins are available in the market, but with a high number of installations and positive responses, we think Askimet Spam Protection is the number one choice.

All you need to install it, activate and choose the level of protection, you are ready to go. Once you are done with all the settings, the Akismet Spam protection will continuously keep on scanning all the comments and if found anything suspicious, automatically will move them to the spam folder.

Add social sharing buttons

As a WordPress blogger, you would like your content to be shared widely. And this only can be possible, when you install social share buttons on your blog. These, social share buttons can be fixed either on the left side of the blog or the bottom of the content. This plugin will let you add social media share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.

A reader can easily share your content with their friends on various social media platforms with a single click. All, you need to do is to download the “Social media share button” from the WordPress directory, Install it and activate it.

Install Google Analytics Plugin

To monitor your website performance, see its stats and generate reports, Google Analytics is the best tool available right now. Once, you have created a google analytics account and linked your website to it. You can easily track and monitor all your website vitals daily.

But to make this feature a lot easier and taking it to another lever for getting better experience and performance. Some WordPress Plugins let to directly integrate your Google analytics with your WordPress dashboard. Hence, MonsterInsights is one of them, that easily integrates with any SEO plugin and Helps you to monitor the website vitals on the same dashboard.

Always ensure backup of your Blog

While running a blog, it is always highly recommended to be cautious about any misshapen with your blog. To reduce the risks, you must take daily backup of your blog to avoid any data loss in case of a site crash or hacked. Vaultpress is an amazing Free backup WordPress plugin from Jetpack, that makes this whole process a lot more easier and automatic.

Completely owned by jetpack, you do not need to pay a premium for creating and maintaining complete website backup. All the features come with jetpack premium packages. However, if you do not want to use any WordPress plugin, you can also use other alternative solutions such as backing up your website via your Hosting service provider or doing it manually.

8. You are Ready to Start Blogging

Now at this stage, your website is almost ready to push contents and start bogging. But before that, there are some essential points that you must consider. Like deleting all the irrelevant, sample pages or posts from the Dashboard that WordPress has by default after installation.

Composts your first content

To add a new post or compose, you need to navigate through you Posts menu , click on “Add New” option, the page will load a new page showing similar to the picture below:

At first you need to consider the main three points as mentioned below:

1. Add a title to the post: This field is most important for your blog. As it determines what is your content all about and it has major weight on SEO’s point of view. It should be interesting, SEO friendly, Eye-Catchy and Relevant to content.
2. Body of the Content: After the title of the content, the next thing is to write. This section holds the majority of your screen. With different options to edit, such as multiple writing styles, pictures, videos, Gifs and many other options, you can use your creativity to bring out more attractive content for your readers. Even the engines favour only rich content which has high audience retention. The more you write, the better will be the visibility.
3. Optimizing your content: Only writing long paragraphed content is not enough for getting better organic traffic and rankings. For better results, you need to optimize your content for the search engines. User, Rank math SEO plugin and complete its parameters while writing content.
4. Add rich media and tags: When you upload any rich media such as videos or pictures. Do not forget to add tags with them. This will help to easily search content based on tags on your blog.

If all the above main four points considered, it is now time to hit the publish button to push your content for the readers. However, there are a lot more things you need to consider, but initially these four points are the pillar ones.

Adding up more features

Being WordPress an open-source platform, there is no limitation to its flexibility. Similarly, to increase the features and functionality of any website, there are tons of WordPress plugins are available. You can add multiple pages, themes, plugins, customize them and there are a lot of other things you can do with it.

Summary

With help of the above easy steps, one can easily start their own blog. Indeed, it is easy to start a blog only if you start it with the basic settings rather than hopping directly into the deep of it. At first, it seems a little difficult, but slowly and steadily, making some changes and learning from it, can lead you to become Pro.

No doubt, at first you may face some issues with the theme that you have used and the plugins you have installed, but the only thing that matters a lot is the content you produce. And you should note that no matter how your website looks or the features you have, if the readers like your content, you will definitely be successful.

If you found anything that we have missed to mention or you would like to add your own points to it. Please write your valuable suggestions in the comment section below. We would love to hear from you.

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