Complete guide to setting up a WordPress website from choosing hosting to configuring essential settings, installing a theme, adding plugins, and going live.
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Hosting and Installation
Choose a hosting provider and plan
Shared hosting costs $3-10/month and handles sites with up to 25,000 monthly visitors. Managed WordPress hosting costs $15-30/month but includes automatic updates, daily backups, and staging environments. For a new site, shared hosting is fine to start.
Install WordPress through your host's control panel
Most hosts offer one-click WordPress installation. The process takes 2-5 minutes. Choose your site title and create an admin username that's not 'admin' — bots try 'admin' as the username in 90% of brute-force login attempts.
Connect your domain name to the hosting
Point your domain's DNS nameservers to your host. This is done in your domain registrar's dashboard. DNS changes take 15 minutes to 48 hours to propagate globally. Most changes are visible within 1-2 hours for 80% of users.
Install and verify the SSL certificate
Most hosts provide free SSL certificates. Enable it in your hosting panel. Then in WordPress Settings > General, change both 'WordPress Address' and 'Site Address' to use https://. Without SSL, browsers show 'Not Secure' warnings to all visitors.
Core Settings Configuration
Set your site title and tagline
Settings > General. Your site title appears in browser tabs and search results. Keep it under 60 characters. The tagline should briefly describe what your site offers in under 120 characters. These are the first things search engines read about your site.
Configure permalink structure
Settings > Permalinks. Choose 'Post name' for clean URLs like /my-article instead of /?p=123. Do this before publishing any content — changing permalinks later breaks all existing links and hurts search ranking. 'Post name' is the best option for 95% of sites.
Set your timezone, date format, and language
Settings > General. Set the timezone to match your target audience. If your readers are spread across time zones, use UTC. This affects when scheduled posts publish and how dates display. A post scheduled for 9 AM will use whatever timezone is set here.
Configure reading and discussion settings
Settings > Reading. Choose whether your homepage shows latest posts or a static page. Settings > Discussion. Decide if you want comments enabled — if yes, set comments to require approval before appearing. Spam comments can accumulate at 50-200 per day on unprotected sites.
Set up your homepage and blog page
Create two pages: one called 'Home' and one called 'Blog.' Then in Settings > Reading, set 'Your homepage displays' to 'A static page' and assign each. This gives you a designed homepage rather than a chronological list of posts.
Theme Selection and Customization
Choose and install a theme
Go to Appearance > Themes > Add New. Look for themes with 10,000+ active installations and recent updates within the last 3 months. A theme that hasn't been updated in over a year may have security vulnerabilities or compatibility issues.
Customize branding colors and fonts
Appearance > Customize or the Site Editor. Set your brand colors, logo, and fonts. Stick to 2-3 fonts maximum — each font adds 50-200 KB to page load time. Choose a system font stack for body text to avoid loading any external font files.
Set up navigation menus
Appearance > Menus. Create a primary navigation menu with 5-7 items maximum. Menus with more than 7 items decrease user engagement. Add your most important pages first: Home, About, Services/Products, Blog, Contact.
Configure the site footer
Add footer widgets or edit the footer in the customizer. Include copyright text, links to privacy policy and terms, and optionally social media links. A well-structured footer is used by 10-15% of visitors looking for specific information.
Essential Plugins
Install a security plugin
A security plugin adds login rate limiting, file integrity monitoring, and firewall rules. WordPress sites get hit by 90,000+ hack attempts per minute globally. Most attacks are automated bots trying common passwords — a security plugin blocks these automatically.
Install an SEO plugin
An SEO plugin lets you customize title tags, meta descriptions, and generates XML sitemaps automatically. It also adds structured data markup. Without an SEO plugin, you have no control over how search engines display your pages in results.
Install a caching plugin
Caching plugins create static HTML copies of your pages, reducing server load by 80-90% and improving load times from 2-3 seconds to under 1 second. Enable page caching, browser caching, and minification of CSS and JavaScript files.
Install a backup plugin
Set up automated daily backups that save to an external location like cloud storage. Keep at least 30 days of backup history. Test the restore process at least once — a backup you can't restore is worthless. Full-site backups for a typical WordPress site are 500 MB-2 GB.
Install a contact form plugin
Add at least one contact form on a dedicated Contact page. Include name, email, and message fields at minimum. Add a honeypot or CAPTCHA field to prevent spam — unprotected contact forms receive 10-50 spam submissions per day within weeks of going live.
Content and Pages
Create essential pages
Every site needs at minimum: Home, About, Contact, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service. The privacy policy is legally required in most jurisdictions if you collect any data (including analytics). WordPress has a built-in privacy policy generator under Settings > Privacy.
Create About page with your story and mission
Create Contact page with form and details
Create Privacy Policy and Terms pages
Write and publish your first 3-5 blog posts
Launch with some content rather than an empty blog. Aim for posts of 800-1,500 words — posts in this range get 2x more social shares than shorter ones. Include at least one image per post and write a custom meta description for each.
Set up categories and tags
Create 4-6 main categories that cover your content topics. Use tags sparingly for specific subtopics. Too many categories or tags (more than 15-20) creates thin archive pages that hurt SEO. Each category should have at least 3 posts before it's useful.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to set up a WordPress website?
WordPress itself is free. Hosting runs $3-30/month depending on traffic (Bluehost, SiteGround, and Cloudways are popular choices). A premium theme costs $40-80 one-time. A custom domain is $10-15/year. Total first-year cost for a basic site: $80-200. Premium plugins for SEO, security, and backups can add $100-300/year but free alternatives exist for all of them.
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
WordPress.org is the free, self-hosted software you install on your own hosting. It gives you full control over themes, plugins, and customization. WordPress.com is a managed hosting service that limits what you can install on free and lower-tier plans. For a business or professional site, WordPress.org with your own hosting offers far more flexibility for roughly the same cost as a WordPress.com Business plan ($33/month).
How many plugins should I install on WordPress?
Keep it under 20 active plugins. Each plugin adds code that increases page load time and potential security vulnerabilities. The sweet spot for most sites is 8-12 plugins covering security, SEO, caching, backups, forms, and spam filtering. Before installing any plugin, check that it has been updated within the last 6 months and has 10,000+ active installations to reduce risk.
Which WordPress theme should I use?
GeneratePress, Astra, and Kadence are the fastest free themes, loading in under 0.5 seconds on a clean install. They all support the block editor and pair well with page builders. Avoid themes with built-in sliders, demo imports of 50+ plugins, and 'all-in-one' feature sets, as these add 200-500 KB of CSS and JavaScript that slow down every page load.
How do I keep my WordPress site secure after setup?
Run WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates within 48 hours of release, as 56% of WordPress hacks exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated software. Use a security plugin that blocks brute force login attempts (which hit the average WordPress site 1,000-5,000 times per month). Enable automatic daily backups so you can restore quickly if something goes wrong. Change the default admin username from 'admin' to something unique.