In the recent era after the social media boom, blogging is in the field that you should invest your time by reading and especially writing a blog post.
When you get a chance to write a new blog, you will often search on the internet about how you can write a blog?
And guess what, you will find lots of search result in Google with a WordPress blog.
If you are not in the technical field and you see a WordPress you probably thinking that, What the heck is WordPress?
You are on the right path on searching more detail on WordPress, then you will probably see some post like, how to create a WordPress blog?
You might be thinking that oh! This is all involved the hosting and domain and all the stuff, which you really don’t have an idea.
But In the series of post, I will cover in detail step-by–step guide how you can start your self-hosted WordPress blog and why WordPress is the best platform out there to start your new blog.
You see the term “Self-hosted” in above paragraph, you might be thinking what is self-hosted?
Don’t worry I will cover every aspect of the term in this post.
So here is the one thing, if you are serious about writing your blog post and ready to invest $5 per month then, self-hosted WordPress.org blog is best for you.
There is another blog platform from WordPress which is WordPress.com which is similar to blogger blog.
In Wordpres.com blog you will have your blog name something like, yourblog.wordpress.com and there are many restrictions you will have in wordpress.com blog. You can check all the comparison here.
But the self-hosted blog you will have more leverage and customization on your blog you will get your favorite yoursite.com domain and guess what? more engaged with your audience with your self-hosted blog.
Ok, Hold on there is a lot of technical term in this post and you probably heading off your mind from the WordPress?
Today WordPress powers up almost 28% websites worldwide these are including from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online.
With the powerful feature like a custom design, SEO friendly, High performance, Responsive mobile site, and easy to access. WordPress has become the most resourceful platform with over 45,000 plugins that will eliminate the possibility that you don’t have to know the coding at all.
Today more than 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power their blog and website.
Why is WordPress most popular? As mention earlier, because WordPress has the most resources and the worldwide community that constantly improving WordPress.
You probably write a big post on Facebook and many of your friends and reader engaged with the post with like or share, the same exact way WordPress has the same feature.
Once you write your blog post in WordPress you will have more idea how you can engage the audience to your blog and drive traffic through various technique, more traffic means you can make quick bucks on your blog, by advertising partner with Google Adsense.
Here are the some of the features that will highlight why you should create a WordPress blog.
- Ownership
- Customizable Designs
- High Performance
- High Security
- Easy and Accessible
- SEO Friendly
- Control
- Community
This is the best points why wordpress.org self-hosted blog has more leverage and benefit compare to blogger and a self-hosted blog.
1.Ownership
You are the proud owner of your blog in the self-hosted blog.
But wait, the WordPress.com and blogger blog also created by you and you must be the owner of your blog, right?
No, this the very interesting discussion even though you have created your content and created your blog and you’re just using blogger or wordpress.com’s infrastructure.
It’s very hard to understand the ownership, especially in blogger. It’s not owned by you and Google or WordPress.com have the authority to shut down anytime without your information.
2.Customizable Designs
Well, wordpress.com uses the same platform as Wordprees.org. but for the self-hosted blog, you will have more freedom what you put on your site.
Like wordpress.com blog will have by default ad, that you can’t remove unless you buy their premium subscription.
And one main thing with wordpress.com is very limited and you cannot upload a custom theme.
3.High Performance
WordPress is highly scalable with running on PHP server you can scale the WordPress platform with an anticipated high amount of traffic.
You don’t have to worry about high yield traffic WordPress has optimized to handle all this traffic.
On more thing, you may in a dilemma that will high traffic will crash my website? even though I have the high-performance infrastructure.
That’s not the case here in WordPress especially the team who developed WordPress have high bar set up to manage the WordPress on the server.
4. High Security.
In recently last 2-year WordPress has enhanced the security performance and now WordPress is highly secure.
But you always have to be cautious when you installing theme and plugin on your site, always install plugin ad theme from trusted partners and get the latest version of the WordPress.
5. Easy and Accessible
You may be thinking about what will be the WordPress dashboard look like, it’s very easy to understand and you can add multiple author or multiple admins to manage your blog.
When you create a WordPress blog you may have to think about allowing some other user to post on your blog or manage your blog(in terms of development.) you always have that feature to manage users.
6. SEO Friendly
There are many plugins for SEO but WordPress designed by making the platform very robust for user-friendly. Multiple features inbuilt that will help you to enhance your SEO and also you can add third-party SEO plugin.
I will cover more on SEO plugin in a future post.
7. Control
WordPress is the Open source, that means it’s free and you can customize as per your requirement, that’s why you will find a plugin for any features in WordPress plugin directory.
you can customize the core feature of WordPress and also you will find a plugin for your need like eCommerce, Forum, etc.
8. Community
WordPress community is very huge, as mention earlier 28% website run on the WordPress platform. So you will find people who are working on the WordPress platform as a Developer.
WordPress support forum has a huge advantage over getting help from people and in Stackverflow.com you will find all your technical need so the community is vast you are not alone.
by Having strong blog platform will help to get the setup easy and quick.
Ok Now, you have decided the getting the WordPress as a platform for your first blog.
What next?
You will need domain and hosting provider for your blog so that you can power up self-hosted WordPress blog.
I highly recommend Bluehost for hosting and domain. Blue host is recommended by wordpress.org and it’s very reliable for WordPress.
For a new blog or website, you won’t need much infrastructure but BlueHost comes with 1 click WordPress installation.
It will be very easy to set up a blog on Bluehost offers $2.95/month for the single website including domain.
Once you set up the Bluehost account, the instruction is very easy to set up your first blog.
I will cover more on hosting your first self-hosted blog in future posts.