In the old days you would need a web designer and developer to start up a website. Those days are long gone with the help of software such as WordPress.

Software such as WordPress makes it easier than ever to create a website of your very own and have it up and running in literally just a few minutes.

Are you not sure where to start?

Then here is a basic checklist that will cover everything you need to start up a website.

 

Register a Domain Name

The domain name is basically what the address of your website is, such as your-domain-name.com.

There are a number of tools out there that can help verify your domain name is unique or, if it’s not, suggest some alternative domain names.

Try to find the .com version of your chosen domain name. If you can’t then .net is another good option.

Tip: Try to make sure that the domain name is easy to remember and contains a keyword related to the subject of the website. So if you’re a cleaner have the word “cleaner” in there.

For example, if you want to rank for the keyword Soccer World Cup betting, you should try to insert this keyword in the domain name.

 

Find a Web Host

Next you need to find a web host for your website. Think of web hosting as a bit of space you rent on the Internet to house your website. It’s not a major priority but it is something that should be considered important.

There are tons of hosting options out there, split into four main types; shared, WordPress, VPS, and dedicated.

It’s a good idea to get started out with shared hosting because it’s much cheaper and easier to find. You can switch to VPS or dedicated hosting at any time by upgrading your plan or changing hosts.

Tip: To make sure your website stays online try and find a provider with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Without this guarantee your website could be offline for days throughout the year. Also, shared hosting will do just fine in the beginning. As your website grows and it attracts more traffic, then you can move to a managed WordPress host like Kinsta.

 

Build and Design the Website

The best way to design a website is to use WordPress. WordPress is the leader of the website building market with over 60 million websites built using WordPress.

There are thousands of themes to choose from, including free themes, that allow you to create a truly unique website.

All you need to do after choosing a theme you’ll just have to add your own custom images and text and alter the design to make the website yours.

Tip: If you don’t know what you’re doing there are hundreds of video tutorials on YouTube to guide you through adding posts, pages, and images to your website to make it more advanced.

 

Create your Social Media Accounts

Whether your website is brand new or you’ve been around the block for decades, social media is a must-have for your online marketing strategy.

The easiest way to get started is to create a new email account to register all your social channels. Once you registered the accounts (and been verified) spend some time on customizing the profiles with your logo, description and link to your website.

Tip: Only create accounts on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Post regularly and whenever you publish new content on the site make sure you post it on your social accounts as well.

 

Set Up Google Analytics and Monitor the Stats

After the website goes live you need to keep an eye on it using Google Analytics. Just sign up using your Gmail account to monitor the traffic on your website and see where your visitors are coming from.

Google Analytics is able to give you a full report about the status of your website and how it is performing.

Tip: Don’t expect visitors to your site to roll in by the thousands. Starting a brand new website take time, and it takes time for visitors to know it’s there and to find it.

That’s it..

Hopefully by now you have a basic understanding of what you need to start your very first website.