At first glance, WordPress.com is confusing. There are themes, templates, plugins, and many other things that can muddy your experience if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You’ve been told WordPress is the best platform for blogging, e-commerce, and small business websites, and that’s not wrong. WordPress is wonderful.

What often gets overlooked is the learning curve required for building your website on WordPress. I’ve used WordPress for more than 10 years now and I still learn ways to improve techniques to this day. What it lacks in simplicity, it more than makes up for in power.

If you’ve never used a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Drupal, or Wix, you’re in the right place. My goal is to simplify the process of starting a WordPress site.

43% of all websites are built on WordPress. You don’t get to own nearly half the market share of a massive industry by being mediocre.

Pricing Plans

Step one to launch a WordPress website is to choose a pricing plan. Some plans include a one-year domain name registration. If not, you can buy a domain name through WordPress or GoDaddy.

How much does a WordPress website cost?

WordPress offers 5 pricing tiers starting with the free plan and going up $45 per month for the E-commerce plan. Unlike WordPress.org, WordPress.com subscription fees include hosting. If you start small and discover you need more features later, upgrading your plan is seamless.

With the Free plan, the themes are attractive, and mobile responsive so they work great on computers and phones alike.

The biggest downside is the random advertisements appearing at the bottom of your web pages. This is why I strongly discourage using the free plan. Especially if you want to give your best effort toward building and hopefully monetizing a great website. As soon as you upgrade to $4 per month for the Personal plan, the ads disappear. That’s only $48 per year if you pay annually. It’s worth it.

With the Premium plan of $8 per month, you gain access to premium themes, which opens up a whole new world of design. The WordPress branding in the footer doesn’t bother me. It’s discrete and it doesn’t interfere with your site.

The ability to install and activate plugins isn’t available until you commit to the Business Plan at $25 per month. We’ll talk about plugins a bit later so you can decide if you need them. Here you have the option to remove the WordPress branding from the footer of the site.

Finally, if you plan to sell products on your site you’ll want to check out the E-commerce plan. It includes the ability to take payments and integrate with shipping companies.

Choosing Your Theme

Step 2 in launching your WordPress site is to choose a theme.

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is a website template that defines fonts, colors, and page layouts making it easy to build web pages without knowing how to code. WordPress.com has a ton of themes for you to choose from.

If you subscribe to the Premium plan or higher, you can customize your theme for an even greater look and feel. From simple items like fonts and colors to more advanced options like custom CSS (cascading style sheets is a rule-based coding language) for stylizing buttons, graphics, and text.

So how do you choose the right theme?

Free vs Premium Themes

With the free plan or personal plan, WordPress gives you 15 free themes to choose from. In reality, there are more than 15 because you’ll have access to last year’s themes as well. This makes your choice relatively simple.

With the premium plan and higher, you can use themes labeled “premium” in addition to the free ones. You also have a nice button in the top right corner of the theme selection screen that says “Install New Theme”.

Clicking “Install New Theme” shows you a few thousand WordPress.org themes. The “free” and “premium” themes I mentioned above are built by WordPress. The WordPress.org themes are typically built by a third-party company that designs WordPress themes to sell.

With the premium plan and higher, you have access to these themes for free, however, many have a subscription fee to use all the features of the theme. Make sure you read the description.

Are you blogging? Which blog template appeals to you visually? Look at the fonts and the colors. Look at how others have used it. Check out the “live demo” to see it in action.

Are you a photographer? Portfolio or magazine themes will work well for you. These are visually pleasing layouts with beautiful galleries and clean lines.

Are you selling products? The product-focused themes are best in this scenario. Depending on how much business you plan to do, you will want to look into the Business or E-Commerce pricing plan to see if incorporating payments and shipping options is needed.

Once you’ve figured it out, click on the pink “Activate” button. Remember, you can always change your theme. It may take some work to make it look right, but you’re never married to one theme.

Adding Your Content

Now that you’ve chosen a design for your WordPress website, it’s time to add your content. There are a few different ways to do this. Let’s look at 2 different ways to present your content: posts and pages.

What is the difference between posts and pages in WordPress?

Think of posts like newspaper articles. You can categorize them, tag them, and they’re automatically displayed in your “post feed” and dedicated “blog” page.

Pages are more like permanent sections of your website, usually found in the main menu. They’re static spaces for essential information that doesn’t need frequent updates.

Editing Posts and Pages

The WordPress block editor is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s the same interface for both posts and pages. These are the “building blocks” for your pages. There’s a block for paragraphs, another for images, one for displaying social media feeds, and the list goes on.

When building your page or post, keep an eye on the “design” blocks. These blocks shape the visual page layout making it simpler to add your content. These blocks are “containers” that tell your content how to look. You can split sections of your pages into columns and determine the width of each section using the “columns” block.

Get creative by testing the different design elements. Discover how each element effects the look of the page. There are also pre-built page templates within your theme. Simply click “page” in the top right corner, then “template,” and choose from the list of layouts ready for your input.

Posts

Even when building a small business website, I encourage site owners to plan blog content. When created intentionally, blog articles will build topical authority and trustworthiness for your brand.

To create a blog post, click “posts” in the lefthand navigation within the WordPress interface, and click the pink button that says “add new post” in the top right corner. Give it a title and start writing.

The pages of your website convey information about you, what you do, your products and services, social proof and testimonials, how you help people, and calls to action.

Adding a page is just like adding a post. Click “pages” in the lefthand navigation, then click the pink button that says “add new”. You will be prompted to choose a pre-built template from your theme, or “blank canvas”, which is exactly what it sounds like.

One of the best things about WordPress is the ability to customize your entire site. So, if you don’t like one of the fonts in your theme, you can change it. If you want certain colors for each part of your site, you can add them. On a more advanced level, you can add custom code to create a completely unique look.

Creating Styles

As long as your theme supports full site editing, you can create different styles for the blocks on your site. Your theme will tell you whether it supports full site editing in the description when you first choose it. You can click on “Appearance” in the lefthand navigation to see your theme’s description.

To create a style for your site, roll over “appearance” in the lefthand navigation and click on “editor”. From here you can click inside of the window that displays your site.

Then, click the black and white circle icon in the top right of the screen. This opens up a long list of blocks for customization. For example, you can make all buttons on your site use the same font and color scheme. You can make all headings a certain size, font, and color. This saves time instead of changing each element every time you add it. The customizations are never ending.

Adding Widgets and Plugins

Within each WordPress website theme, there are designated areas where you can place widgets. Most themes have a widget area in the sidebar (left or right side of each page) and the footer. Some themes have a special widget area. You can customize your widget area once to make it appear the same on every page.

What is a WordPress widget?

A widget is a block of content that can be placed in the sidebar or footer of your WordPress website. Widgets can connect to your social media feeds, capture email addresses, or contain a simple call to action like “Subscribe”, or “Book a Meeting” buttons.

There are shopping carts, blog post carousels, contact forms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and the list goes on. Use widgets to drive people to your social media page or download resources. Make sure you preview your page before you publish it after adding a new widget. Not all widgets work well with all themes so you may need to adjust the settings to make them look right.

What is a WordPress Plugin?

WordPress plugins are like apps that extend and strengthen the functionality of your site. Most are installed with one click and require little effort to set up. There are more than 50,000 plugins that range from boosting your SEO to creating a more friendly “drag-and-drop” style page editor.

Browse the plugins library to find help with marketing, organic traffic, optimizing your images, pop-ups, or building subscriber lists.

TIP: Be careful which and how many plugins you install. Many plugins slow down your site loading speed. Always check and delete unused and unnecessary plugins. You can do that by rolling over “Plugins” in the lefthand navigation and clicking on “installed plugins”. Find the one you want to delete and click “deactivate”. Once it has been deactivated you can click “delete”.

Search engine optimization can increase visibility and traffic for your website by making it clear to search engines what your website is about. SEO is constantly changing and evolving, however there are some foundational principles that you can use to help your pages rank higher on Google.

I have created a FREE downloadable On-Page SEO Guide and Checklist for you to use.

You can also read more about search engine optimization in a previous article.

Final Thoughts

Launching website on WordPress doesn’t have to be difficult. Take time to explore what everything does. Trial and error is the best way to become an expert. Think of it as a journey instead of a destination. Your website will never be finished and that’s ok. Just start building!