WordPress Setup Guide :

This is a guide for beginners to create their own WordPress blog in 5 Minutes. I will be extending the guide with Version 2,

and you can be the first one to get notified by subscribing here.

WordPress is one of the most widely used Blogging platform. It’s an open source CMS which is powered by PHP and

MySQL. According to recent surveys, almost 16.7% of websites on Internet is powered by WordPress. Like BlogSpot which

is powered by Google, WordPress is powered by it’s parent company Automattic which offers two variation of this popular

blogging platform; WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We are not going to differentiate between free and self hosted WP

blog at this moment, but we will quickly learn aboutWhat is WordPress and about two variations of WordPress here.

WordPress.org vs WordPress.com

WordPress was launched as a Blogging platform but now it’s fully evolved into a content management system. That means,

you can use it to run fully-functional business Websites. There are many E-commerce, Membership websites are running

on WordPress. WordPress team also offers buddypress plugin, which convert WordPress into Social networking site.

WordPress has two variants and most of newbie get confused between which form of WordPress they should opt for.

WordPress.com Blogs A.k.a free WordPress domain blogs:

WordPress offers free WordPress blog which can give you address like anyname.WordPress.com. You also have an option

to add custom domain to your blog, which is managed by WordPress and gives you limited access to settings. Like you

can’t install every WordPress theme you wanted but you have choice to install Free themes from WordPress theme directo-

ry or some selected premium WordPress theme. This platform is good for non serious or hobby bloggers. Anyone on the In-

ternet can go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free account and get a WordPress.com blog instantly.

Limitations of WordPress.com blogs:

You can not add custom WordPress theme

To use custom domain, you need to pay for itYou can add custom PHP codeLimited Way of monetizing your blogYour blog could be deleted by WordPress team for any violation of their TOS.No FTP AccessLimited Space

Useful links:

Get a WordPress.com Blog

Learn WordPress.com

Self Hosted WordPress blog A.K.A. WordPress.org blogs:

Self hosted blog, as the name suggest, needs to be installed on your server. You download WordPress software from

Word- Press.org and install it on your server. Usually you buy a shared hosting and install WordPress on it. You have

complete control over settings and customization and you are not limited to anything. Though self hosted blog requires

investment in terms of custom domain name and hosing space. This is more popular as you have power to monetize your

blog and have complete control over everything.

Some more info about WordPress:

WordPress was first introduced in 2003, founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is also the founder of WordPress parent compa-

ny AutoMatti c. Automattic also offers other services like:

VaultPress- which ensure WordPress backup and security.

Aksimet plugin - which catches the spam comments.

Jetpack plugin- Which brings many features of WordPress.com into self hosted WordPress blog including WordPress

stats.

WordPress has given a complete new dimension to online business and many 3rd party services and tools are available

in the market, whose models completely run on WordPress.

How to Install WordPress on Bluehost Hosting

Now, we will learn how to create our self hosted WordPress blog.We will be using Bluehost for this purpose. Bluehost offers

unlimited hosting, unlimited domain, cPanel, One click WordPress installation, custom script installation, free adwords

coupon and free domain registration for one year.

Here is a special Bluehost discount link, which will help you to get special discount on Bluehost Hosting.

Sign up for Bluehost

So, I assume you have your domain and hosting purchased from Bluehost and you have Bluehost login with you.

If you are accustomed with other cPanel hosting, you will have no problem using Bluehost cPanel, but if you are new to

them, this Step by step tutorial will help you to get started. If you have purchased domain from somewhere else, you need

to change the NS to point to Bluehost nameservers. I.e:

ns1.Bluehost.com

ns2.Bluehost.com

Once, you have updated the NS and you used the same domain name while purchasing hosting account from Bluehost, you

can simply start with WordPress installation on Bluehost hosting. Login to your Bluehost cPanel account by typing your

domain name and password given at the time of sign up.

There are two site builder script offered by Bluehost to Install WordPress: Simple scripts and WordPress. I will not go into

the pros and cons of any of them, as you can use any of them to get started with WordPress within 5 minutes. For the sim-

plicity of this tutorial, we will use Simple scripts method to Install WordPress.

Under BH cPanel, click on Simple scripts under Site builder:

Now, you will get a huge list of blogs and forums, that you can install using simple-Scripts. Click on WordPress, under Blog

section.

As soon as you click on WordPress, you will be taken to Wp install script page. There are two options: Install and Import.

Click on “Install“.

Setting up Simple scripts for WordPress installation:

Now, we are on the page where we will configure the complete WordPress installation on Bluehost. Let’s understand every

step one by one:

WordPress Version:

First field is WordPress version. You can always check the latest WordPress version on official page here. And by default,

you will get the latest WordPress as an option. If you wish to install an old version of WP, you can simply select the Wp ver-

sion from drop down menu.

WordPress Installation directory:

When you are installing WordPress, you get two options to Install Wp on your domain: With www or without www Prefix. I

usually prefer to keep it without www now, as short is always sweet. There is no SEO advantages or disadvantages of us-

ing www or non www.

If you wish to install blog on sub directory, that is domain.com/Blog, simply add blog or any other suffix you want to use for

your WordPress blog.

Advance options:

Once you are done with version and Installation path, next is to configure options like WordPress admin login and pass-

word. Other options like Blog name, you can always edit later from Settings > General under WordPress dashboard. Also

remember, by default your admin Email address is your Bluehost account Email address. (Email address you used for

signup).

Plugins and Themes:

Third option is to install some pre-configures themes and plugins, which I suggest you to uncheck and start from scratch.

I prefer, to keep my WordPress installation as clean as possible and install only those theme and plugins, which I’m going

to use. Wait for my next tutorial on essential plugins for your blog.

Step 4: License agreement

And like any other software installation, you just need to agree with license agreement and click on complete. Within min-

utes, your WordPress site will be installed and running on your new bluehost account.

On the next page, you will see the status of your WordPress installation and once it says, complete you can login to your

WordPress dashboard by typing http://domain.com/wp-admin (replace domain.com with actual domain name).

Now, all you need to do is finalize the WordPress setup.

Set up WordPress blog in 5 minutes:

In this guide, I will add screenshots and explain every WordPress settings, that you need to configure. You can skip

certain settings, depending upon your requirement for example, if you are creating a membership site or guest blogging

WordPress blog, you can open user registration. So, lets get started with ourWordPress setup guide and learn how to set

up WordPress blog. Specially, for newbie this guide will help them to understand WordPress and help in understanding how

to work with WordPress.

You can login to your WordPress dashboard by going to http://domain.com/wp-admin (replace domain with actual do-main

name).

First thing first:

Once you install WordPress blog, you will get a default post “Hello World” and a default comment. Delete them and follow

the rest of the tutorial:

Settings > General

This is where you will configure your Homepage name and tag line. This is very important, as by default this is what shows

up in Google search. Email address will be your site admin Email address and this is where you will get all the Email notifi-

cations related to your site.

Now, for the security reasons, if you have a single authored blog. I suggest you to disable WordPress registration. Else, if

you creating a membership site or implementing guest blogging opportunities, you can enable it and give it subscriber role

by default. For allowing registered member to submit blog post, you can change the default registration permission to

con-tributor. also, make sure you setup the timezone to your local time, this will make sure your scheduled post will go

accord-ing to your timezone.

Settings > Writing

At this stage, we will set up WordPress settings related to writing. By default, WordPress adds a category “Uncategorized”

which doesn’t look so ideal. Here you can change the default category to any other category. You can go to posts> Cate-

gories from left sidepanel, and add a new category. Come back, and change the WordPress default category to newly

creat-ed category.

WordPress ping list:

One of the major difference between a static Website and a blog is ability to ping. By pinging search engine bots, our Word-

Press blog notifies the search engines about newly published blog post. You should update your ping list with all majo r ping

services . Add all the ping services URL and click on updat e button. I also recommend you to use PushPress plugin to ping

cloud ping servers.

Also under Settings > Writing you can enable or disable atom publishing and XML-RPC Services. If you are using any

desktop blog editor like Windows live writer, you need to enable XML-RPC service.

Settings> Reading:

Now, at this WordPress set up page, you can configure many things like what should be your blog homepage be. For exam-

ple, here at WpFreeSetu p, we are using custom home page and not a regular blog page. So, we changed the homepage

to custom page we designed. For a normal blog, you can let the setting be “Your latest posts” as shows in screenshot.

You can also configure number of maximum blog posts to show on homepage and in feeds. Also, you can set if you want to

publish full content or just partial content in the feed, I prefer to offer partial feeds(Summary) , as I want more activity to

happen on my site and also to avoid RSS theft.

Settings > Discussion

Here we configure comment related settings on our

blog, and also one important settings which happens

due to comment pagination. Here are settings which I usually use on my blogs: I’m writing down the settings which requires

to be on.

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article

Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)Allow people to post comments on new articlesComment author must fill out name and e-mailEnable threaded (nested) commentsAnyone posts a commentA comment is held for moderationAn administrator must always approve the comment

Avatar settings:

Now, if you are new to WordPress, I suggest you to

go to Gravatar.com and create an account and

upload your image for your Email address. And here, you can make changes like gravatar rating and default gravatar. If you

wish to use a custom gravatar, you can refer to this guid e.

Settings > Media

Though, you can skip setting up this part but I usually

suggest users to make come necessary changes to

avoid lots of im-ages files. By default, when you upload images in WordPress, it creates images in 3 different sizes. Here

you can set sizes as 0*0 and keep only one desired size as enabled along with size.

Settings> Privacy:

This is the setting tab, where you configure if you want search engine like Google to show your blog in searches or not. I

usually keep it off until I’m completely done with WordPress set up and ready to write my first post. If you are done with set

up, select the option which says “Allow search engines to index this site.”

Permalink Settings:

This is one of the initial setting, which every

new WordPress user should change.Default

WordPress permalink is not search engine friendly, and we should select one of those option which gives us maximum

search engine advantage.

I prefer to keep it as: /%postname%/

First one is useful, when you are planning to submit your site on Google news, and second one if simple and very effective

for SEO. Go to Settings > Permalink and change your permalink to /%postname%/ and click on update. Make sure, you do

this step before publishing any new blog post..

With all these changes, you are done with set up of WordPress blog. Now, we need to make more changes like add

plugins, submit sitemap, Install theme, customize look and usability of our blog.

How to Install New WordPress Theme

You can always directly search for any WordPress theme from WordPress theme repo and directly install it from dashboard.

Or you can download the .Zip file and install it. I’m a huge fan of Premium WordPress themes, as they offer better feature

and functionality over free theme and most of free WordPress theme and premium theme club let you download the .zip file

of theme and you can install it. So for the sake of making things simple, I assume you have downloaded the theme in

.zip format.

So, once you have downloaded the WordPress theme, login to your WordPress dashboard. Click on Appearance > Theme.

Click on Install theme.

On the next page, click on upload and it will bring you up on upload theme screen. Simply click on browse and locate the

.zip file of WordPress theme you have downloaded. Select and click on Install now. It might take a minute or two, depend-

ing upon the size of theme and your internet speed. Once done, it will show the installed theme screen.

Before activating the theme, you can click on

“Live preview” to see how theme will look

before activating it for everyone. Once you are satisfied with the look and feel of theme, you can click on activate and your

newly installed theme will be live for public. Though, if you wish to make some changes into theme before making it live on

your site, you can use Theme tes t drive WordPress plugin.

Another way to install WordPress theme is by uploading it directly via FTP, but again that will be a long process and it’s

useful when you don’t have a .zip file of your theme. Though, you can always archive your theme in .Zip format and install

it from dashboard. If you wish to learn, how to install WordPress theme manually or via FTP, you can refer to official do c

here.

How to Install WordPress Plugin

One of the most basic thing which you need to learn about self hosted WP blog is to install WordPress plugins. There are

many ways by which you can install a plugin in WordPress blog, you can use any of these three methods to quickly add a

plugin:

Install plugin by Searching from dashboard

Upload .zip folder to WordPress and installInstall via FTP

I won’t recommend installing by FTP until you don’t have permission to install a plugin from dashboard, and most of the

recommended hosting companies like Bluehos t, Hostgator gives you enough permission to add plugins from dashboard. I

have already shared a list of must have plugins for WordPress blog, you can refer to it to get the best of plugins for your

blog, and read on this tutorial to learn the whole process.

If you wish to search plugin from WordPress plugin repo, you can simply get the name of the plugin and do a search from

dashboard and install it.

Login to your WordPress dashboard.

Click on plugins> Add New

Search for plugin which you wish to install.Click on Install nowActivate the plugin and configure it’s settings.

That’s it and you are done installing the plugin. There are many plugins which are old and have not been updated for

years, but they are still very useful. Since you can’t install such WordPress plugins by searching, you can download

the .zip folder from official repo and install it. Here is a quick guide on installing .zip format plugin:

Login to WordPress dashboard

Click on plugin > Add New > UploadClick on upload > browse the .zip file > Install pluginActivate and configure settings

This is pretty easy and below I have added a video tutorial which will give you a better understanding of the whole

process. Also, when you are downloading plugin, make sure you download it from credible sources like WordPress

plugin repo , Codecanyon , or official plugin page of plugin developers. Avoid downloading plugins from any non

credible sources like free file sharing sites, torrents.

I hope this guide helped you to understand this basic but one of the most important part of using WordPress blog. If

you still have any question regarding the whole process of plugin installation in WordPress, feel free to let me know.

Must have WordPress Plugin:

Here I will add the exact name of the plugin which you need to search and install. Most of these plugins come with

extra configuration and you should make sure to make optimum changes for making most of these plugins.

Akismet:

This plugin is managed by official WordPress creator Automatti c. This plugin is very useful to avoid spam comments.

There are many alternative to this plugin but I prefer this one, as it’s fast and does the job pretty well. You can

download plugin from official page her e. You need API Key to activate this plugin and you can quickly create a free

account on WordPress.-com and get your WordPress API key.

SEO plugins:

WordPress SEO by Yoast:

WordPress SEO by Yoast is an advanced plugin by Yoast, which integrated many important features from some of the

pop-ular SEO plugins for WordPress like Robots meta, All in one SEO, RSS footer, Sitemap and many more. This

plugin require proper configuration for optimum performance. Along with above feature, you can also edit your

Robots.txt, .htaccess file using this plugin. This plugin also offers Keyword suggestion and Keyword optimization,

which will give you an extra edge in Search engine ranking. Also, you can configure indexing and no-indexing of your

site structure which is very useful for proper SEO of your blog. <Download WordPress SEO>

How to setup WordPress SEO by yoast

Google XML Sitemap:

Sitemap helps search engine bots to crawl your site effectively. Google XML sitemap plugin helps you to generate

sitemap of your blog and also as soon as you publish new post, this plugin will keep updating the site map. This is a

dynamic plugin and you need to configure it only once. Simply install this plugin and create a sitemap and submit it to

Google, Bing and Ya-hoo and forget about Sitemap submission after that. For better result, put a sitemap link in the

footer of your blog as it helps in deep-indexing of your blog. <Download Google XML Sitemap plugin>

XML Video and XML Image sitemap plugin:

Images and videos are also great way for ranking and when you are creating a normal sitemap using Google XML

Sitemap plugin, it doesn’t list images and videos. XML video and XML image sitemap plugin for WordPress helps in

creating sitemap for your images & videos, and you can submit them to search engine service and drive traffic to your

site. < Sitema p for Image > < Sitemap for Videos >

YARPP: Yet Another related post plugin:

Though this plugin is more of usability plugin but I prefer it as SEO plugin, because it helps in linking to related article.

YARPP also offers settings to show related posts in feeds, which helps in decreasing down the bounce rate and

increasing user experience on your site. If not YARPP, you can use any other way but showing direct related posts will

help in boosting your site usability. <Download YARP P>

SEO friendly Image:

Images helps a lot in driving traffic to your blog, but to rank for images you need to work on alt tag optimization of your

blog. SEO friendly image plugin does the same by, converting your image name into Alt tag and make it search engine

read-able. Bonus tip: Always use your Keyword or relevant name as image name. Avoid using Image-001.jpeg and

such names.

<Download SEO Friendly image>

PushPress:

If you are suffering from indexing issue on your blog, try PushPress which is a free WordPress plugin to ping cloud

servers. It helps in faster indexing of your blog. This is a plug and play plugin which doesn’t require any configuration.

<Download PushPres s>

WordPress Insight plugin:

WordPress insight plugin is very useful for WordPress blogger to do a search and insert links directly from WordPress

edi-tor. You can search for term within your blog or in Google, Wikipedia and other sites. <Link:Insights plugin>

Increase usability:

Now, here are list of those plugins for WordPress, which will help you to extend it’s capabilities and give better user

experi-ence.

WpTouch:

Number of people using smart-phones are increasing day by day. Wptouch is an easy to set up plugin for WordPress,

which will make your site mobile optimized. I’m using this plugin and tested it on iPhone and iPad and it works great.

You can also insert your adsense codes from WpTouch settings to monetize your mobile site. <Download Wptouc h>

W3 Total cache:

Page load time is one important factor for great user experience and also for better search engine ranking. W3 total

cache is a complete solution to your WordPress caching. This plugin comes with advanced configuration and caching

options. Also, if you are using any CDN service and cloudflare, this plugin offers easy to implement option for

configuration. Though, some of the webhosting companies doesn’t work great with W3 total cache, in this case I

suggest you to try WpSuper cache. <Download W3 total cache>

Contact Form 7:

Contact page is an essential element of a website. Contact form 7 plugin let you create multiple contact forms and

you can also add contact form in sidebar of your blog. There are many more contact forms like Gravity forms, but in

free options this is one of the easy to set up contact plugin for WordPress. <Download Contact form 7> I have also

tried Enhanced Word-Press contact form by Yoast, which is equally good and easy to configure. This plugin shows the

referral link location and you will get an idea, who visitor landed to your contact form. Check out Enhanced WordPress

contact form.

Wp Db manager:

One stop plugin for doing various maintenance job and schedule job in WordPress. Using this plugin you can quickly

opti-mize WordPress database, clean WordPress tables, take WordPress backup and configure WordPress timely

backup. Very useful plugin to get many things done. <Download WpDb manager>

Wp Optimize plugin:

Another useful plugin to delete all posts revisions, delete all spam comments and optimize WordPress table. Though,

you don’t need to use this plugin all the time but running this plugin once in a month, will keep your blog performance

in good shape. <Download Wp optimize plugin>

Digg Digg WordPress plugin:

Social signals has become an essential part of SEO and to encourage social sharing of your blog post, you should

must im-plement social bookmarking button. Digg Digg plugin helps you to quickly add most of the popular and new

social book-marking buttons. More over, this plugin comes with many settings like lazy load button, social button size

and other place-ment settings, which you are hoping in a Social bookmarking plugin. <Download Digg Digg> There are

few alternatives to Digg-digg plugin like Slick share & sexy bookmarks.

JetPack plugin:

This is another official plugin by WordPress, which comes with many options that they offer to WordPress.com users.

Also,

this plugin contain some of the essential elements that you would be requiring for example: WordPress.com stats,

Subscrip-tion option for commentator, Spelling and grammar check, Contact form and also many more features. In future

WordPress is planning to add some paid modules for example, right now they have integrated VaultPress which is their

premium WordPress backup service. Though, all paid services are optional and to use this plugin you need to have a

WordPress.com account. Also, disable any cache plugin which you are using while configuring Jetpack plugin.

<Download plugi n>

Wp Smush.it:

Smsuh.it is an online service by Yahoo, and smush.it plugin does the job pretty well of compressing your images for

faster loading. Your image quality remains the same and using image compression technology, this plugin will

compress images at the time of loading. This plugin also comes with bulk image compression of already uploaded

images. So, if you have new or old blog, Wp smushit plugin will help you to keep your blog loading time faster.

<Downlaod Wp Smush.it>

The list of plugins for WordPress are endless and you can browse WordPress plugin repo to find plugin for every use.

But, these are some of those must have WordPress plugins, which are essential for every WordPress blog. Do let us

know about any other new wp plugins,which should be in this list.

WordPress Resources:

Webhosting:

Bluehost

Hostgator

Themes :

Premium Press

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