WordPress is the number one choice Content Management System (CMS) of bloggers, with more than 60 million WordPress website running today according to Forbes. Some of the top sites running WordPress are Forbes, Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, TechCrunch, TED, NBC Sports, UPS, Yahoo Blogs, Ebay and many more.
The availability of plugins and themes that you can use to easily customize your site makes WordPress on top. Plus, this platform is a search engine friendly, meaning every page that you publish can easily optimize to search engine like Google to make it rank in our chosen keywords.
As a beginner, you can create a website in WordPress for free using the .wordpress suffix but if you want to create a website in WordPress using your custom domain, you need a server, and of course a custom domain.
These are the six steps how to create a custom domain website in WordPress, this is a broad topic, I will make a separate post on each step to make it easily understand.
- Buy your desired domain name in a domain registration site like GoDaddy.com. Check the availability of your chosen domain name, price is from $10 per year depending on your domain name. Read step by step instructions here.
- Choose your hosting provider or server, this is important, make sure that your server is reliable, fast and also affordable since you are starting you don’t have to spend more. But if your site receives heavy traffic or high volume of visitors you need to spend more on your server. In this tutorial I will use Hostgator as a sample to host your site (www.efrennolasco.com is hosted on Hostgator).
- Point the domain name in your server that host your site. Hosting provider gives you the name servers that you can use to enter in the nameserver field in your domain registrar. After you enter the nameserver you will wait a bit to propagate your site. This will depend on the domain registrar, before it will take about 2 days or more before you can access your site but today you don’t have to wait that long, starting from 15 minutes you can start accessing your site.
- Install WordPress on your server, remember that we are using Hostgator hosting provider in this tutorial. Hostgator is using cPanel and WordPress is included where you can easily install.
- Create your content, you can start creating your content after you successfully installed WordPress, you can access the WordPress admin panel by typing yoursite.com/wp-admin in your browser address bar and proving the username and password that you created in the installation process in step 4.
- Customizing the look of your site, WordPress have tons of free themes and plugins that you can download to use in your site or if you want to use the default themes and settings include you bypass this step.
That’s it you have created a custom domain website in wordpress. Creating custom domain wordpress site is easy, just make sure that you have a credit card or PayPal account to pay your domain registration and the hosting provider for your site.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this tutorial are affiliate links, meaning if you click the link and buy on the services or package that I am recommending I will get a small commission without additional charge from you.