How To Build A Website With Bluehost for beginners ?
Building a website with bluehost is now easier than ever. In fact, you can get your website built within a few minutes with this how to build a website with Bluehost beginner’s guide.
One of the great things about creating a website with Bluehost is that you don’t have to be an advanced programmer or coding expert to create your website.
You might be wondering how is this possible? Bluehost provides easy-to-use website builders that allow you to build and build your website in minutes.
Bluehost recently updated their checkout page to automatically install your website so you can start building your website in no time.
Why choose Bluehost For Building Your Own Website ?
let’s talk about what makes Bluehost a good choice when building a website
Bluehost powers over 2 million websites and over 850,000 blogs around the world. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee which means you don’t have to worry
about your site going down.
Bluehost offers a 30 day money-back guarantee and provides 24/7 customer support. Another great thing about Bluehost is that they are profitable.
How To Build A Website With Bluehost ?
Let’s get started with our guide on how to build a website with Bluehost. To start out, we want to sign up with Bluehost.
Click here to open up Bluehost to get your hosting plus a free domain name. You will be on the Bluehost home page. Click on the Get Started Button
You will now be on the Bluehost page where you can choose between four different Bluehost plans. You can choose between a Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro plan.
The basic plan works well for most . This plan is good if you only have one website.
For those running multiple sites , and unlimited email accounts , you may want to use the More plan , The Plus plan comes with Spam Experts and a free 30 day trial of Office 365 mailbox.
Spam Experts is an email filtering system that will scan incoming emails to make sure there are no viruses or spam.
The Office 365 mailbox is optional, but it might be worth a try if you go with this plan.
CHOICE PLUS
The Choice Plus plan includes all the features of the Plus plan with added privacy and security features ; It comes with the Bluehost Domain Privacy + Protection and Site Backup — Codeguard Basic add-ons.
Domain Privacy + Protection protects your personal contact information and does not let it go out where telemarketers can contact you to sell you their services or spammers.
Site Backup — Codeguard Basic is an add-on that backs up your site daily and lets you restore your site with one click , If something happens to your site you can easily get it back to the way it was.
The Pro plan I don’t really recommend it for beginners . I recommend upgrading to this plan if you need to once your traffic and revenue grows. The Pro plan comes with everything that the Choice Plus plan comes with and a Dedicated IP and 2 Spam Experts allowing two of your email addresses to have a spam filter.
The next step in our How to build a website with Bluehost for beginners is to pick out a free domain name. You will see where you can choose and create a new domain, enter a domain name that you already own, or create one
If you choose to create your free domain name later you can do so from your Bluehost account. If you already have your own domain name from another provider you can type it in and click the next buttton.
Next, I’ll walk you through getting your free domain name. Input a domain name that you would like. You will see where you can pick out your domain extension where you see the .com dropdown.
I recommend you go with a .com if you can as this is the most popular domain extension. Most people refer to sites with .com so it can make it easier for your site visitors to find you if they are typing in your specific URL.
The domain extension .net is another popular and good domain extension to use. The domain extension you go with though is entirely up to you. Click the next button when you have a domain name that you want.
Bluehost will now tell you whether the domain name you have chosen is available or not. If it is available, it will indicate available.
If your domain is unavailable it’ll let you know. If your domain name is unavailable you can search for a new one. If you want to have the domain name you entered you could try using a different domain extension, adding a -, adding another word to the domain name.
I do want to mention that if you purchased your domain name from another provider, you would need to point your nameservers to Bluehost.
If you bought your domain name with GoDaddy here’s a post going over how to point your GoDaddy domain to Bluehost. Purchased your domain name from Namecheap? Here’s a post going over how to point your Namecheap domain to Bluehost.
Next, put in your account information.
Right under the account information section, you will see package information.
Next, we want to choose a hosting term. Click on the dropdown next to account plan.
Account plan is where you will choose your hosting term. You’ll see 12, 24, or 36 months. You will see the price per month is cheaper the farther out you purchase your Bluehost hosting for.
You will see that the domain name registration is free along with Let’s Encrypt SSL.
If you don’t know what SSL is, SSL protects your customers’ information such as their password, user name, and credit card information from malicious hackers.
Search engines like Google will rank sites higher that are using SSL as this is one of the ranking factors. To know if a site is secure or not you can go to a site and look in the browser and you will see HTTPS instead of HTTP before the domain name along with a green lock icon .
You will now see some additional services offered by Bluehost in the next section Package Extras. It is entirely up to you to obtain them. You can add one of them later if you are not sure now.
Domain Privacy + Protection I highly recommend. Privacy & Domain Protection protects your personal contact information and does not display it on the web where telemarketers and spammers can get it. With the Domain Privacy + Protection add-on, Bluehost’s information will be displayed, not yours.
Codeguard Basic is an add-on that will backup your site daily and allow you to restore your site with one click. If something happens to your site, you can simply restore it to a previous version where your site was okay
Bluehost SEO Tools Start is an add-on that will provide you a personalized marketing report so that you can optimize your site to help with ranking for keywords. Bluehost SEO Tools Start will also automatically submit your site to search engines.
I do want to note that your site will be indexed and crawled by Google and other search engines on its own without the automatic submission. I don’t recommend this Bluehost add-on but you might find the report and helpful advice it gives you regarding the SEO of your site helpful.
An Office 365 add-on mailbox isn’t really necessary. This can be useful if you want to have your own Microsoft Outlook email account and want to design it.
The next add-on is Sitelock Security-Essential. Sitelock Security-Essential protects your site from malware and malicious attacks
Next, you want to enter your payment information. Make sure you select the I have read and agreed to Bluehost’s Terms of Service. Click the green submit button.
Bluehost is going to email you your Bluehost login credentials along with some welcome emails. One of the emails Bluehost will ask you to verify your domain name.
Make sure you do this, so your domain name doesn’t get canceled at a later date. If you purchased your domain name from another company, you don’t need to worry about this email.
Next, in our how to start a website using Bluehost guide, you will be asked to create a password. Click the create your password button.
You now want to enter a password that you would like to use for WordPress. WordPress is the Bluehost website builder that I will be using in this how to build a website with Bluehost guide for beginners .
Don’t want to build your own website on Bluehost with WordPress? there is no problem. Bluehost currently offers 55+ website builders to build your site with. Log in to Bluehost’s Cpanel to choose a different website builder. I offer a screenshot of Bluehost’s Cpanel and how it looks like later in this article.
Here’s a complete list of the 55 Bluehost website builders :-
WordPress
Weebly
GoMobi
Xoops
Joomla 2
Joomla 3
Drupal 7
Drupal 6
B2evolution
Croogo
OCPortal
MODx
Concrete5
LiveSite
phpwcms
PHP-Nuke
Textpattern
PyroCMS
e107
Geeklog
AnchorCMS
Chyrp CMS
Noah’s Classified
Open Classifieds
ShopSite
PrestaShop
CubeCart
OSCommerce
Magento
OpenCart
TomatoCart
ZenCart
AgoraCart
Moodle
Chamilo 1
Chamilo 3
LimeSurvey
Simple Machines Forum
Vanilla Forums
My BB
phpBB
PunBB
Coppermine
Piwigo
Zenphoto
Gallery
4Images
Oxwall
Elgg
Pligg
MediaWiki
PmWiki
Tiki Wiki 9 LTS
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
DokuWiki
Why start a WordPress site with Bluehost ?
Some of the things that I want to clear about why you choose WordPress to build your website is that WordPress is not only used by Fortune 500 companies around the world !
How to create a WordPress website with Bluehost ?
You will see a congratulations page after creating your password for WordPress. Click the blue login button to continue choosing a free WordPress theme for your site.
Bluehost will now provide you with a selection of great free WordPress themes to choose from for your website. Below these, you will see an Ignore button. Don’t hesitate to skip this step if you wish. If you see one that you want, you can choose it and you can always change it a little later.
A good place to find free WordPress themes is WordPress.org. Their directory offers hundreds of free themes for your website.
A little later how to build a website with Bluehost guide, I will show you how you can choose free WordPress themes right in WordPress.
If you struggle to customize and build your WordPress site on Bluehost, Themeforest is a great site where you can get premium WordPress themes that look like an award-winning design agency has designed your site. I advise you to check them out.
After choosing a free WordPress theme from Bluehost or skipping the step, you’ll see a page saying you’re all set, get started building. Click the start building button to continue building your WordPress site with Bluehost.
You will now be on your WordPress dashboard. You will be asked some questions. If you don’t need any help, you can select the option that indicates you don’t need any help.
You will now see some Bluehost tools in your WordPress dashboard. These tools are very useful when creating your website on Bluehost.
You can add new web pages, blog posts, add Woocommerce if you plan to sell products, and you can customize your site menu.
A button should appear saying Start Your Blog. You can easily name your site title and site description here.
On the left side of the WordPress dashboard, you’ll see tabs that you can choose from. You can easily add new website pages, blog posts, read comments from your blog posts, add images to your website, etc.
Find Appearance in the left menu. Hover over it, and you will see Themes. Click Themes.
Next, click add new to pull up free WordPress themes to choose from.
You will see free WordPress themes that you can browse and choose from. There are thousands of features to choose from. You can search for the Featured, Most Popular, Latest, and Favorite features that you’ve marked as favorite, and by searching in the search box on the left.
I highly recommend Astra for building your WordPress website with Bluehost, Astra has a bunch of free website templates that you can choose from for building your website with Bluehost. They have paid templates as well. Here’s just a few out of the many of the free templates shown below.
When you find a theme you like, hover over the theme and click install.
Once the theme is done installing click activate to activate the theme you chose.
If you purchase and download a Premium theme from Themeforest, you can download the premium WordPress theme from the page where you can select WordPress themes. Click on the download theme located at the top of the page.
You can now upload the theme from your computer.
How to design a website on Bluehost
Now I want to explain how to design a website on Bluehost. Designing a website on Bluehost is not at all difficult. I have provided some useful resources related to designing your website on Bluehost after showing you how to design your website on Bluehost.
Once you’ve chosen a WordPress theme, now you’ll want to start customizing, designing, and building your website using whatever theme you want.
To make building your WordPress website on Bluehost fun and easy, I recommend the most popular drag and drop editor, Elementor. Elementor has over 4 million active installs and makes it easy to build a website.
lementor has a free and paid version. The paid version has more features but the free version is super valuable.
A great plugin to install to make a website on Bluehost even smoother if you decide to use Elementor is Envato Elements — Photos & Elementor Templates. Here’s what the plugin looks like below.
They have over 100 free website templates to choose from.
The plugin also has a ton of pre-made template blocks to choose from for any kind of page for your website.
Here’s an example of a pre-made block template.
conclusions :
i hope you enjoyed my beginner’s guide on how to build a website with Bluehost.
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