How to install WordPress on BlueHost. Step-by-Step Tutorial

Your website should be the hub for your business and serve to attract and convert your audience regardless of what your business offers.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to sign up for a BlueHost account, get WordPress installed and configured and then help you publish your first blog post. You can use this post as a step by step guide to getting you there.

If you have questions, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Let’s Get Started

Getting a Bluehost Web hosting account

Setting up a Bluehost account and installing WordPress is a lot easier than it used to be.

When I first started using Bluehost back in 2001, they were a small company run mainly by Matt Heaton and it took a little more effort and technical knowhow to set up your site and get WordPress installed. There were less features, products and support compared to now. They’ve grown and the services and support they have is great.

I’ve been recommending them for years and many of our clients are on either Bluehost or they use the HubSpot platform.

Before you head over to Bluehost and click on the Get Started Now button, there are a few things to consider. You will need to select a plan and you will need a domain name.

1) Choosing a domain name

If you haven’t chosen a domain name you should do this now. You need to either choose 

How to choose a domain name?

Choosing a domain name is different for everyone but should be rooted in your goals. If you’re goal is to build a personal brand, then register your name like I did. If you are creating a new product or service than you will want to find a domain name that works with your brand. For example, my company Marketing Stream didn’t want to pay over $10,000 dollars so we used the .io extension.

Choosing a domain name can be challenging as there are not many meaningful dot com domain names available unless you want to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars trying to get one.

The upside however is that there are many new top level domain extensions to choose from like .co, .pro, .guru, .ninja, .travel, .agency and many more. 

Searching for an available domain name

The Bluehost domain search interface has been redesign and makes it easy to search for and register new domains. Now when searching for your niche keywords the results provide many automatically generated domain name ideas and options.

 

To check out the new domain registration interface, simply visit to the Domains section of your Bluehost control panel, then go to the Register tab. From here, you can search for the domain you’d like to register and click “Check” or click the “Bulk Register Domains” button to search for multiple domains at once.

If you have searched

Continue through the shopping cart experience and when your done and logged in and see this screen below come back to continue finish getting WordPress installed.

2) Choosing the right web hosting plan

Bluehost offers three plans, the basic, the plus and the pro.

This website is hosted on a pro account. I like it, it provides the level of performance this site needs but, you need to choose a plan that works for your specific needs & budget.

If you are just getting started, choose a basic plan and when the time comes that you need better performance, it’s easy to upgrade your service just by calling into the Bluehost support team.

3) Search, Select & Pay for account

Now that you have chosen an available domain and you know the plan that suits you, go ahead and head over to Bluehost and click on the Get Started Now button.

Come back to step 4 when you see the following screen in your new Bluehost account.

4) A quick overview of your Cpanel dashboard

Your Cpanel dashboard provides you with access to all kinds of features and tools to help you manage you web hosting server.

These are broken down into the following categories.

• Website
• Email
• Domains
• Marketing
• Stats
• Files
• Database tools
• Upgrades
• Security
• Preferences
• Advanced
• Partners
• and more…

Each of these tools within these sections does a specific thing and i’ll cover some of these more in the future. If you have a specific question, you can leave a comment below.

Alright! With your hosting account setup, let’s get WordPress installed and working.

5) Installing WordPress with one click

Find the “Install WordPress” button in the Website category and click it.

 

Click on the Install button.

Choose your domain. If you only have one, it will show in the dropdown.

Select it and click Check Domain button.

It will check your domain to ensure the settings are correct and then if all is well, it will display the last step to installing WordPress.

Click on the “Show advanced options”, enter your site name, change the email if you want and change the password if you want as well. You can keep these settings here for now and change the site name and password later but the admin email will have to stay the same so make sure it’s the one you want.

When you’re done, read the terms and conditions, click the check box to confirm and click Install Now button.

The system will now install WordPress on your server. You can watch the progress at the top in the status section.

When it’s done, it will provide you with links to your home page and a link to the admin dashboard.

Admin URL will look something like this -> www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin

I would suggest bookmarking your admin URL so it’s easy to find a login as you work on your new website.

Click on the admins URL and login to your new WordPress dashboard.

Time for your 1st blog post

You should see your dashboard once logged in.

Your dashboard gives you a place where you can get an overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can view your draft posts and activity like who’s linking to you, who’s commenting and how popular your content’s been. Learn more about the Dashboard here.

From here you can write your first post, customize your site, add pages and more.

Click on Write your first blog post, add a post title, write your post content and click publish.

Congratulations! You’re done.

Nice work! You’ve published your 1st blog post.

What am I missing?

I want this tutorial to be as helpful as possible to you so if I’ve missed a step or you think there’s an area that needs more detail, leave me a comment and let me know.