In previous posts on creating a website, I addressed the practical how-tos that anyone can use to create a website with WordPress, as well as the reasons why someone would want to do so. In this final part, I’m going to talk about the finishing touches of website development, as well as uploading it to a host so that the world can finally see what you’ve created!

Finding a Host and Domain for Your Website

When I first thought about writing this final post on creating a website, I thought I would do a step-by-step walkthrough of exporting and uploading your website to a hosting service. As I was creating my site, however, I realized there were differences in the many services I used (this is part of the reason why it’s taken me so long to release this last post). This means that a step-by-step guide would be pretty unhelpful if someone were to use a hosting service different than I mine. So instead of doing that, I’m going to make a few recommendations, which I might revisit and edit in the future.

Hosting services are third-party businesses that ‘host’ your website on their servers. Most hosting services have built-in WordPress integration these days, so as soon as you sign up, you can navigate to their WordPress setup tutorial and get right into it. I’ll be talking about the main ones people use with WordPress, namely GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Amazon, but there are others as well.

But before we get to hosting services, let’s talk about––

Getting a Domain Name

A domain name is the “.com” or “.org” address that people enter into the browser to navigate to your site. Whether you use domain.com to register or another third-party service (like your hosting service), getting a domain name is as easy as choosing the one you want and paying for it online. Of course, “choosing the one you want” is deceptively difficult.

Since the Internet has been around for a while now, many of the domain names that you may want could be taken. It is especially rare to find something that can end in “.com” or “.org” that is also catchy and easily brand-able. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Going on the domain service of your choosing and then typing in what comes to mind is generally the best way to go about it. Here, in no particular order, are a few rules and tips to go by:

1. Getting “.com” is still the best way to go. Even though this is significantly less important nowadays, having “.com” at the end of your domain name is still the best and easiest way your website can be discovered. It’s pretty rare to to find any popular website pages that don’t have “.com” at the end of their domain. So, as much as you can, try to find a fitting domain name that hasn’t been taken by “.com” yet.

2. If you’re doing a personal blog, and you can’t find the name you want, try using your own personal name (or online username, if you wish to remain anonymous) and add a “.com” or “.net” to it. If you have an especially unique name, it might be much easier to find the right domain name to go with that rather than something generic like “writers.com” or “coolblog.com”.

3. Do your best to let the name of your website be the same as the domain. This is purely for search engine purposes. When the two match up, they generally are easier for people to search for them online.

I would highly recommend using a hosting service that you’ve provided to find your domain name, as it’s must easier to connect your website to your domain name when your hosting service is providing both. And so, with that, let’s see what hosting services we can use for our WordPress website.

Recommended Hosting Services

If you’re using WordPress.com, this entire section is probably completely non-essential for you, since WordPress.com provides a lot of services, including website hosting, for WordPress sites. However, for those who have been developing your own sites as this series has been mainly talking about, here are a few hosting services that are popular for many WordPress sites (especially small time ones like me).

Note: Flywheel, the company that created the Local app we’ve been using, also has a hosting service, and if you decide to use them, it’s extremely easy to export your site from Local to Flywheel’s hosting. I’ve never used them, however, so I can’t recommend them.

GoDaddy –– this was the hosting service I started with when I first made my own website. The great thing about GoDaddy is that it’s extremely easy to set up, and the service is decently fast. Furthermore, like a few other hosting services, you can register your domain name on GoDaddy, and they make it pretty easy to connect your website to it. And of course, the reason I first began using it was because they were fairly inexpensive. While I don’t use them anymore, they are still a great service to get started with, especially since they moved their servers to Amazon.

Amazon Web Services –– While Amazon is known to consumers as the main online shopping portal in the US, the services with which they actually make most of their profit is their web services. These web services are incredibly vast, and include things like video hosting (for sites like Netflix), video gaming networks, and of course, web hosting. Additionally, if you expect a lot of traffic on your site, Amazon Web Services is the best way to go, as their service scales depending on how much bandwidth you use. Of course, because they have so many different web services, it can be a bit daunting to try to get started with them if you’re running a simple personal blogging site. In spite of all that, if you want to get started with Amazon, their Lightsail program is probably the easiest way to get started.

Bluehost –– Bluehost has been making its name for providing a platform for WordPress users for a while now. They actually existed all the way back when I first started blogging online (2006!). Because they’ve been around for a while, most problems that one may have when dealing with WordPress bugs or glitches are easily dealt with in their services. Like GoDaddy, you can buy your domain name with them, and easily attach it to your website.

The above are the platforms I’ve used or are familiar with for creating a website, in addition to other kinds of web services. They offer straight forward ways to get started on WordPress by making it a step-by-step process, and are simple enough to get into without needing to get into much technical jargon.

After setting up your hosting service, if you do use one that is separate from where you get your domain name, you will need to connect them together. This part gets a little tricky, as different sites have slightly different ways of doing so (so me giving instructions wouldn’t be very helpful). There are two simple ways to do this.

First, some hosting services offer to help you do so, and you can follow their step-by-step instructions. Second, if your hosting service doesn’t offer this, you can do a web search for connecting your domain to your chosen hosting service, and follow steps from there.

Exporting and Uploading Your Website

If you’ve been following along this series, the last thing you’ll need to do to make your site go live is export your site from Local by Flywheel and import it into your host service. There are a few ways to do this. However, we’ll only go over one way, as others require quite a few steps. If this way doesn’t work for you, you may have to search around a bit to see what other options there are.

First, go to the Dashboard or “admin” part of your website in Local. On the sidebar, there is a “Tools” option. Click on it. Under it, there is an “Export” option. Click on that.

You should now be looking at the Export page similar to the above. Here, you see options for exporting all or specific parts of your site. For our purposes, click on “All content”, and then “Download Export File”. This creates an XML file for you.

When you log into your WordPress site which you set up with your host, click on the same “Tools” page on the Dashboard. Then select “Import” instead of “Export”. You’ll see a number of options to import from, the last of which is WordPress.

The first time you import, it won’t say “Run Importer” as above, but “Install Now”, like the other ones. This is because you need to install the WordPress Importer plugin. So click on “Install Now” under WordPress. After it’s installed, it will prompt you to import the XML file we downloaded from before. If it doesn’t, just go back to the Import page and choose “Run Importer” and follow the instructions. Once you’ve imported the XML file, it may ask whether you want to create a new author for all your posts, and whether to install all attachments. Attachments are all the media (like images and videos) which you used for your website from before. Once you confirm after this step, it will import all the posts, pages, and other content from your website.

Once this is done, you can check out your website by clicking the top button with your website name. You’ll find something interesting: it may not have imported any of the themes or plugins!

This is one of the weird things that this simpler import process doesn’t do. What you’ll need to reinstall them on the host site if you’ve been using third party themes and plugins on your Local website. It’s a bit of a hassle, but something that we have to work with. In the end, though, we get to be thorough about what we are putting on our site.

Finishing Touches for Your Website

As you finish designing and putting the content you want on your website to get it ready for a grand release, there are a few things you want to keep in mind.

First, it’s important to beta-test your website. This means getting other people to look at it before you release. Other people can give you feedback on your site, and you can do those small tweaks that you would want (or just revamp the whole thing if you’re really not satisfied).

If you haven’t put your website on a hosted platform yet, Local by Flywheel makes this pretty easy in even during COVID-19 lockdowns, as you can use its “Live Link” button to share your website remotely to any friends or family members you want.

Just click the “enable” button down at the bottom after you’ve started your site, and share the link that pops up. Keep in mind that both you and the people you are sharing with will need a strong, stable internet connection, since you’re basically streaming your website to other people.

Second, for any WordPress website, there are a few plugins that are almost universally helpful for managing modern websites. Plus, they’re all free (the ones I use, anyway)! Here are my favorites:

Akismet –– Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that allows you to keep commenting in check on your various posts and pages. It’s was immensely helpful for me when I had my old website, since, despite my website being quite small in reach, I still had thousands of spam comments and commenters that were automatically removed by Akismet.

Jetpack –– Jetpack is a WordPress.com plugin that is automatically installed with all WordPress.com websites. If you created a site based on the kit downloaded from WordPress.org (as this series has been about), then you need to download and install this plugin yourself. It’s an immensely helpful plugin, packaging a bunch of social features as well as site statistics features that are very useful for anyone wanting to see just how their website is reaching audiences. Jetpack also contains Akismet, so you don’t actually need download both.

The downside to Jetpack is that it is pretty heavy, as it really is a suite of features rather than a plugin focused on a single thing. Because of this, it may cause sites to load at a slower speed (depending on one’s internet). So if you’re not going to be using the majority of features given with Jetpack, I would recommend installing the smaller pieces from third parties (like Akismet) and not installing the entire thing.

Yoast SEO –– SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a tool that many web designers adhere to so that the sites they create are easily found in search engines. What Yoast SEO does is make this an easy process by giving each of your website pages a rating, and then giving you suggestions on what you can improve to make your site easier to find on the web. I’ll admit, my site is probably the worst in this regard, and I’m still learning the ropes for making it easier to find, but this plugin has definitely helped me get better at it!

And lastly, any website is going to go through changes and revamps as the years go by. The great thing about WordPress, which I mentioned in part 1 of this series, is that it’s easy to change the look and feel of your website with themes and plugins. And so, you don’t really need to worry about whether your site is super perfect at the start. Things can be easily tweaked as your needs for your website change.

That’s It!

And that’s it! If you’ve attached your domain name to your hosted website, it may take around 24 hours for that to fully connect. But after that, you have a live website made with WordPress that you created and customized!

I hope this has been a helpful series on creating a website with WordPress. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know! And if you're a Coil subscriber, continue on down past the break to get a little surprise!

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