How to Build a WordPress Website for Free (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

If you want to build a WordPress website today, this video is for you. My name is Charlie. I'm an absolute nerd when it comes to building websites, and this is going to be a 100% free step-by-step tutorial on how to build a website using WordPress. If you want to build a website that looks like it costs $10,000 in under an hour, then you'll want to stay until the end. So, WordPress, it's one of the best beginner-friendly,

but also extremely powerful website building platforms out there. Actually, a majority of the professional websites that you see, they're all built using WordPress. And yeah, WordPress used to be a little bit complicated to use, but I'll show you how to use AI to make it a lot easier. It really is the perfect platform for a personal brand website, an e-commerce store, a blog, a portfolio, business website, pretty much anything. And I promise you, this is going

to be one of the most comprehensive, but beginner-friendly tutorials on YouTube. And so, yeah, I hope you guys are excited. Let's get started. Okay, so the first thing that you guys are going to need is a website host. This is where your website lives on the internet. And yeah, every website is going to need to have some type of host. So, the website hosting service that we'll be using today in this video is Bluehost. I have

an absolutely insane deal worked out with them, and basically it allows you to get a website for under $2 per month. This is the most affordable website hosting that I've ever found. And so, yeah, if you click on the link down below in the description, it's going to take you to this exact landing page. And yes, this is exclusive only to my audience, so I really encourage you to take advantage of it. I've built dozens of

websites with Bluehost, and they are absolutely fantastic. And one of my favorite parts is actually they have an AI-powered WordPress website builder. So, I'll be showing you exactly how to use this. It's really, really easy. And I really encourage you guys to follow along. Again, this link will be down below, and it's the only way you'll be able to get this really good deal. So, we'll click on view WordPress plans right here. And as you can

see, there are a bunch of different options. They start from $1.99 per month when you do 3 years, all the way to $6.99 per month. And for most of you guys watching this video, the one-site or the starter is going to be perfect. As you can see, if you choose a shorter time period, it goes up by a little bit, but it's still super, super affordable. Now, in this video, I'll be taking you through the starter

plan. It's just $2.99 per month. You can, of course, go with the one site if you want to save a dollar per month, but in my opinion, it's not worth it. It's just better to get the starter plan. And the reason for this is because you get to make 10 different websites with one single plan. So, yes, you can literally build 10 different businesses or have 10 different websites just on this one plan. You get 10

GB of storage, which is plenty for pretty much everyone watching this video. You also get a free domain, free SSL, which I think is mandatory, and you also get their AI site builder. So, for this video, I'll just go with the starter plan. It's going to have you choose a free domain name, so you can literally choose what you want your website to be called. For now, I'm going to skip this and actually choose my domain

later. Then, what you're going to do is you're going to create your account, so you'll put your email and your password. I don't think I need to add these on, so I'll leave that blank. And then, you're going to enter in your billing information right here. Once that is all filled out, you'll click on submit payment right here. Okay, so now it's going to ask us if we'd like to use the AI site creator or import

an existing WordPress site. Now, for this video, I'll show you guys the AI site creator. But, of course, if you have an existing WordPress website, you can absolutely import that into Bluehost. So, we'll click on the site creator, and it's going to have us tell us more about our site. And the more information we give it here, the better of a foundational website it's going to be able to build for us. So, I'm going to go

ahead and do something like this, Charlie Chang Photography. We're going to have this be a business or service type site, and then I'll write a description right here. Cool, so I've written something right here, and we will click on next. For the site logo, you can add your own logo here, or you can create one with AI. I'll just show you guys how to do that. We'll click on generate. So, cool, we have three different logos

that it's made us. We can always generate more if we want, but for this video, I'm just going to go ahead and go with this first one right here. We'll set as site logo by clicking that button. And now, we're going to exit out of here. You can see this is our current logo, and we'll click on next. So, as it's building our website, we'll have the option to select beginner, intermediate, or advanced. I'm just going

to select beginner for this video, since I assume most of you watching this are a beginner. And this can to take a couple minutes to actually build our website using AI. Okay, so now it has given us three different websites that we can choose from. And don't worry, this is just the foundation. We can absolutely customize this and add a bunch of different things. This is just the base that we can start with, which will save

us quite some time. So, I'm going to go ahead and go with site number one. We'll click on preview. You can see these are the three same layouts that we saw before. I'm going to look through this. It looks pretty solid to me. So, I'm going to click on save and publish. Cool. Now we are in our WordPress dashboard. I know this may seem a little bit complicated, but I'll show you guys how to navigate it.

And as you can see, our website is now live to the world. So, we can click on view right here. This is our current website, right? It has the logo that we created. It has a few different pages. It has a bunch of different text that the AI has generated for us, right? Like I mentioned, 19 years of experience, so that is listed right here. Now, what I recommend you guys do is come here to the

Bluehost portion of the WordPress dashboard. And what you're going to want to do is just go through this checklist. So, do the quick setup and then customize your website with your logo, if you have one, your brand colors and fonts. You can customize the header, then the footer, and then the homepage layout. And so, for example, let's go ahead and show you guys this one, the quick setup. We'll click on this arrow right here. We'll be

able to select our site title, which I want to leave as is. I do recommend creating a site icon. This makes your website more professional. This doesn't need to be a square and at least 512 by 512 pixels. I recommend using something like Canva or Photoshop or pretty much anything. Set your admin email address. This is very, very important, so make sure you use the email that you want to use. And once you are done with

this, click on save changes. Now, another really important thing that you guys want to do in settings is come here to permalinks. You're going to want to make sure that it is a set to post name. Sometimes it can be set to one of these other ones, but you definitely want post name. Then make sure to click on save changes after you do that. If we come back here to Bluehost, you can continue to go through

this basic checklist of things. So, I'm going to show you guys how to edit your site, which is probably, of course, the main thing that you guys want to see. So, we'll click on site editor right here, and this is going to take you to the WordPress page editor. So, it's very simple to use, and essentially anything that you want to change, you can just click on it. For example, if I want to change this text

right here, which I probably should, say something like this, you can always change the size by clicking on this, write different types of headings, we can make it bold, italicized, bunch of other different stuff, but I'm just going to leave this as is. If you want to change the text on this button, you can just highlight it and then delete, and then let's type in portfolio. Now, as you can see, we have different sections, right? We

have this section right here, this section right here, and these are called blocks. And so, what we can basically do is add blocks, remove blocks, we can rearrange them. So, for example, let's say I want this section to be above this section. We can just click on this button right here, and it's going to move it. We can move it back by clicking down. If there is a section that you do not want to have, so

for example, let's say I want to get rid of this block. So, we'll click on it, we'll click on these three dots right here, and we will click on delete. If at any point you want to undo a change you did, just click on Apple Z or command Z. And if you want to add different blocks, what we can do is come here to this button or this one right here. Wonder Blocks, in my opinion, actually

has better templates, and they look a little bit more professional, so I'll click on Wonder Blocks. This comes with Bluehost, and you can see there are all these different patterns that you guys can use. For example, if I want a completely different hero section, I can come here to hero, I can choose any of these. As you can see, there's a wide range of different types of hero sections. So, just want to select the one that

makes sense for your type of website. Let me just show you guys real quick, let's say we want to add this, we'll click on the plus button, let's move this up right here, and this is now our hero top section. Doesn't really make sense for our particular website, so I'm just going to undo that and I will actually just delete this section. Feel free to go through your website, just change any of the text that you

want to change. You can change any of the buttons as well. If you want to change an image, of course, we'll click on this image right here. We'll click on replace and you have different options. You can select your own image, you can open up the media library. So, every theme is probably going to have some of these images pre-populated. Let's say we want to use this one. Click on select. It's going to change that. You

also have the option to change the layout of each block, right? So, we can play with the content width as well as how wide the section is. Whenever I start with a theme, I try to not change too much, otherwise it's going to look a little bit messy. Yeah, anytime you make a change, make sure you click on save. That's going to save our progress and we can always just come here, click on preview in new

tab. Yeah, we'll be able to preview those changes. Now, as you can see, we're currently on the homepage. One thing you'll definitely want to do is to see how your website looks like on mobile and tablet. Mobile's very, very important because a lot of people are going to access your website through mobile. So, if we click on this, we'll actually be able to edit our homepage with how it looks on a mobile phone. So, if you

don't tweak too much in your desktop view, then this should look decently okay. Let's just go back to our desktop view. Let's say I want to add another block down here. So, we'll click on, let's say wonder blocks. Let's do something like a testimonial. Let's go ahead and go with this one. We'll click on the plus button. Now, we have this cool little testimonial section that we can edit, right? Definitely change up all these for your

testimonials. You can change the number of stars here. Yeah, super, super cool. So, we'll click on save. If I click on this WordPress button right here, we can look at the different pages that we have. So, these are current pages. We can add a page by clicking on this button right here. Let's say rates. Now, we can create a new page by just adding different blocks. Let's say we want to do pricing table. Doesn't make too

much sense for a photography website, but let's go ahead and do something like this. All right, we can add something else like a queue maybe. Let's go ahead and do this one and we'll click on publish. Now if we come back here, so now we have this rates page published right here. I'm going to go back here. We're going to go to navigation. You can see this is the current links that we have in our navigation

bar up here. You can also add pages by coming here and clicking add page and it's very very similar. Now if we come here to appearances, let me show you guys the different themes. So one of the best things about WordPress is that you can actually select from a ton of different paid as well as free themes. So for example, if you don't want to keep using the theme that our AI website builder gave us, we

can click on premium themes or wordpress.org themes. So let me click on this right now just to show you guys some of the different themes out there. As you can see there are hundreds if not thousands of different themes that you guys can choose from. These are sorted by popular, so these are some of the more popular ones. You can also search themes. So for example, if I want to search up photography, there are a ton

of different photography centric themes that we can choose from. And any of them we can click on preview. All right, we can see how it looks. And if for example, you like this theme more, you can always just install this theme. A very very good theme that a lot of people use, it's like a perfect foundation to build any type of website is Astra. So let me show you guys this. I know it doesn't look like

too much right here, but this is a really good, as you can see, highly rated theme that people absolutely love. So for example, if you want to install this, we'll click on install and once it is installed, you can actually click on activate and it's going to make it this theme our main theme now. You can switch between different themes. So for example, since we already edited this theme, I'm just going to reactivate our old theme.

But just know that you can add new themes at any time. You can switch between them. Although sometimes it might make your website look a little bit weird. You may need to change some things if you switch to a different theme. Another really great thing about WordPress is that we can add unlimited functionality and you do that through plugins. Now there are some plugins that have already been installed. So, for any of these, you'll want to

click on activate. So, now we have this anti-spam protection, which is definitely very important. Another really important one to have is going to be Yoast SEO. This one is already activated. So, this is basically going to help you with your search engine optimization. If you want your website to be shown in Google and other search engines, it's very important that you take SEO seriously. WPForms is also very important. So, the light version is already installed. This

is going to be a drag and drop form editor that we can use to build forms. And so, what we can do is click on our first-time configuration. We're going to click this button right here. We'll click on continue. And you're going to want to go ahead and go through all these and fill them out. It takes a little bit of time, but it's super, super worth it. It's going to really help you with your SEO.

At any time, you can come back here, go to SEO, and change the settings. All right, so we can change the site basics right here. You can add a site image, site representation. I recommend filling all this stuff out. when you do different posts, you can have different things show up in your meta description. Yeah, I'm not going to go too much into SEO in this video, but just know that it is important. Now, we come

back here to plugins. You can always click on add plugin right here. You can see some of the more popular plugins that people are installing. For example, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular ones. It's already active. There's different plugins for making forms. For example, if you don't want to use WPForms, you can use Contact Form 7. If you want to start selling products, you can install WooCommerce and immediately have an online store, which is

pretty cool. Yeah, what I would like to do is just browse the popular plugins, see if there's any added functionality that you want right now. Just know that you can always add more functionality later on as you build your website. A lot of these are going to be free, but there are, of course, premium plugins that you can get. But, for most of you guys watching this video, I'd say you don't really need the premium ones.

Most of the free ones are going to be perfect. Real quick, let me show you guys WPForms. If you want to build a form, you'll just click this. The form builder is very easy to use. I don't recommend going with a blank form. Just choose one of these templates. So, for example, let's go with the newsletter sign up form. We can click on view demo to see what it looks like. This looks solid. So, let's click

on use template. We can always add different fields that we want to incorporate into it and this is good for now and we'll just click on save. So, now we'll be able to add this form to any page on our WordPress website. Now, we sort of went over how to create a new page, but some pages that you definitely are going to want on your website are going to be an about me page or about us

page. This is actually one of the most viewed pages of any website. You'll probably want some type of contact page. If you have a service or a product, you'll probably want to have a page for that. And of course, if you have a portfolio, like a photography website, you'll probably want a portfolio page. If you also want to incorporate a blog, you can easily just create a blog page as well. As you can see, these are

some posts that were pre-populated by the AI site builder. Let me click on any of these. Let's see this one. And if you want to edit this blog post, we can easily do that right here. If you click on dashboard right here, this is going to be a solid overview of your website. You'll have your site preview right here. We can see some of our plugins like WPForms. We'll be able to see our checklist right here.

So, definitely go through all these different things. I do want to say another very popular page builder that you guys can use is Elementor. So, you just search up Elementor under plugins, you can install that now. And it's just another alternative to the WordPress page builder. Some people like this one more, some people like the classic builder. It's really up to your preference. Now, going back to the Bluehost dashboard, you'll be able to see all your

different websites right here underneath your hosting plan. They have a bunch of other functionality that you guys can look through. But for example, right now, I want to show you guys our current website. So, this is the current page. Now, if you go to websites, you'll be able to see the details for your hosting plan. So, for example, for the one I just bought, the starter hosting, you can see what websites you have. You can again

create up to 10 different websites on this one plan. You can look at your file manager, your cPanel, and this is a bit more complicated, so most you guys don't need to worry too much about this. If you guys have any questions, you can always contact Bluehost support, and they'll be able to help you guys out with this. But yeah, one of the last things you guys want to do is definitely connect a domain cuz you

don't want to have your website with this temporary domain right here. It's just going to make your website look a lot more professional, and it's definitely a required step. But yeah, that's basically how you can create a WordPress website really, really easily. If you want to create a professional-looking website that looks like it cost a lot of money to build, then just follow these steps with Bluehost, use the AI site builder, or pick your own template,

and spend a couple hours customizing your website. What I've learned from building dozens and dozens of websites is that your website does not need to look perfect. Don't stress too much about the little details. The content is what's most important in terms of if you're building a business or whatever, the marketing is the most important thing. Simply having a website is half of the battle. It doesn't need to be the perfect website, but it is a

very strong tool to help you market it and get more clients. I truly believe that every single person out there in the world should have at least one website. I credit a lot of what I have today due to me building websites when I was super young. Every single project I started, I built a website. I've had so many different types of websites. Yeah, seriously guys, if you don't have a website right now, I really encourage

you guys, go back, watch this video again, follow along as I build a website in front of you, and do it alongside me. This is the most affordable way to build a really great-looking WordPress website. And again, I'll have that link down below to Bluehost, which has the most affordable web hosting. Yeah, if you found any value in this video, make sure to give it a like. Subscribe if you want to see more content just like

this. And yeah, I do a ton of other content about entrepreneurship, finance, and a bunch of other tutorials. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.