SiteGround WordPress Setup Tutorial For Beginners - New 2020 Interface

hi everyone david jackson here whistling in stone marketing.com where i share with you the tools and strategies to help you market your business online so if you're new to the channel consider subscribing and hit the bell so that you'll be notified when I upload new videos in this video I'm going to walk you step-by-step through creating your own website whether it's a personal website or a website for your business I'm going to walk you through purchasing the hosting installing WordPress and even choosing a professional-looking theme my goal is by the end of this video you'll have a fully functioning website that looks like it was professionally created but you don't have to hire a web designer or a web developer to put it all together for you as a matter of fact you don't even need to know how to code anything and I'm also going to be using free tools in order to create this website so the only thing that you have to pay for is your web hosting and that's if you don't already have it so the first thing we want to do is we want to purchase our web hosting I personally personally recommend SiteGround they are they are the only web hosting company that I recommend if you want to find out how you can go about choosing which web hosting service is right for you I created a video that walks through like six or seven criteria that I use in choosing a web hosting company so there should be a link that pops up in the upper right hand corner I think that will take you over to that video so that you can make a determination for yourself as to whether or not you want to use SiteGround if you are interested in using SiteGround and following along with this tutorial I put a link in the description so now what we're going to do is we are going to come down here where it says managed wordpress hosting click on get started and then that takes us to where we can choose which shared hosting plan we want to use my recommendation is if you are only going to have one website then you should start with just the startup plan there's no need for you to use any other plan that's more expensive if you're only going to have just one website and if you're getting started with that website and you're not going to have a lot of visitors in a month as you can see here it says that this plan can handle about ten thousand visits per month to a website and that's a pretty fair amount of visitors so if you're just getting started you won't even have to worry about reaching this threshold and seeing any performance issues for everyone else if you are going to have more than one website then you should probably start with the grow big plan the only difference between the grow big plan and the go geek plan it's pretty much just better resources you get a couple of more features with the go geek plan as you can see here you have things like the advanced priority support the highest tier of server resources so you'll get a lot better performance you have pre-installed git which is like for developers and then you also have white label management if you're like an agency or something like that and if you are really interested in finding out all of the differences between the plans you can come down here where it says compare WordPress plans and that will take you to a page where it shows you the three different plans that you have and all of the different features and which plans include which features so that you can get a better idea of what each plan offers there's really no need for you to take a look at that unless you're a pretty technical person a lot of the features and stuff are for technical minded people so the thing that I go off of is just whether or not you're going to have more than one website if you're going to have just one website start with the startup plan if you're going to have more than one website then I suggest that you go with the grow big plan because it allows unlimited websites so I'm going to go ahead and choose that one because I have multiple websites that I want to have so I'll come down here and I'll click on get and then you will be taken to this page where you can register a new domain name or if you already have a domain name from another registration company like GoDaddy or Namecheap then you can choose that option if you register a domain with SiteGround as you can see here it's 1595 per year that's pretty much on the high side when it comes to domain registrations so I personally don't have any of my domains registered with SiteGround I use Namecheap and I will put a link in the description below so that you can go and check that out and register your domain with them it is cheaper and when it comes to domain registration there really isn't a big difference between the companies that are registering domains so for me I'd rather just save a couple bucks a year and just register it through Namecheap so I'll come up here and I'll click on I already have a domain and I will put in my domain name and then I'll click proceed so now it takes you to this page where you can review and complete your order basically you will be setting up an account if you are new or if you already have an account then you can just log in by using this link here and then you're going to put in all of your billing information your payment information your credit card and then down here for the purchase you get to choose which period you want to use so whether you want to do just a trial for one month there is like a twenty four ninety five setup fee if you're only going to do for one month otherwise I recommend that you do at least a year but you can also do two or even three years and this will be at the introductory rate of 595 per month at the time of this video recording and then after that period is over then it goes up to 1995 per month so as you can see here right now my bill would SP 70 144 the 12 months then you have where you can add extra services the website file transfer is free this is good if you are bringing if you already have a website and you are bringing it over from a different host site Brown will move your website your old website from its old host to their hosting and that is a hundred percent free another service is the SiteGround site scanner I don't recommend that you add this on theirs I really don't find any need for it the only thing it does is it will monitor your website to see if there's any suspicious activity or if there's Benny been any malicious code that's been injected into your website and the only thing it does is it just notifies you it doesn't do anything to help you clean up your website or get rid of the malaysia's code so for twenty dollars a year I think I would just save it so after you've put in all of your billing information and you selected how long you want your plan to be then all you have to do is just come down here and click that you confirm that you've read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and then you can choose as to whether or not you want to receive news and special offers by email then after that come down and click on Pay Now and once your order is submitted it will take about two minutes for it to set up and then within about an hour or so you will receive an email with your username and password and the guidelines for how to manage your account and we'll click on proceed to customer area so now we're going to start setting up our site so I'm going to come up here and click on setup site and this is where you have the option of starting a new website or if you already have a website that you want to transfer over then you can come over here to where it says migrate website and then it gives you more options where you can do a wordpress auto migration which is free but SiteGround off also offers a professional migration which is free so you can select that as well but since I am starting a new website I'm going to come up here click on start new website and I'm going to set up a regular WordPress site for this tutorial but if you want to have an e-commerce store then you can come over here to where it says WooCommerce and you can select that what that will do is it will set up not only WordPress but it will also install the WooCommerce plugin for e-commerce so since I'm only going to do just WordPress I'll come over here and click select and now what it's asking you to do is to input an email address and password this will be your username and your password for logging into your WordPress website once it is all set up so make sure that you use a valid email address and a strong password and once you have put in those two things and you can come down here and click on continue then it's going to ask you if you want to include the SiteGround site scanner again again I don't really recommend that you use it it's up to you but I'm going to skip it and just click on finish now it's setting up the website should take about 2 minutes or so okay and now we're all set so now what I need to do because my domain is registered with another company I need to make sure that I point in the domain name to these nameservers so I need to log into my account where I have my domain name registered and I need to change the DNS settings and I need to change those with the values that they have put right here these are the two DNS servers that SiteGround uses to connect our hosting account with our domain name so we need to make sure that our domain name points to these servers for our hosting account so that our website will show up properly so now I am over at Namecheap and what I want to do is I want to change my DNS so I will change this to custom DNS and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these name servers right here so I'll highlight that do a copy I'm over here paste that in and I'm going to take the other one copy that and paste it and then I'm going to click Save now this is for Namecheap this is what it looks like if you have it your domain name registered with like GoDaddy or another service like that then they might have a different screen and it might look a little different for changing the DNS name servers but you want to make sure that you do this because this is very important that you have your domain name point to your new site ground hosting account and this is what's needed to do that so now that you've changed the DNS name servers to point to site ground we're going to come down here and click on manage site so this will now bring you to the dashboard of your site tools and what you see here at the top are your pen tool so these would be tools that you use most of the time that you use a lot when you sign in so things like your file manager creating email accounts and things like that if you ever want to change any of these what you would do is come over here and the upper right click on the little edit icon and as you can see these are the four tools that we have pinned right now if you want to unpin them just click on the pen in the upper right of that tool and then you have more down here which are separated into different categories so you have like your site tools your security tools so if you want like your backups to be a tool that you visit a lot you can pin that by just clicking on the little pin in the upper right things for speed so you can go through and kind of take a look at the different tools that are available to you and decide whether or not you're going to be using them a lot every time that you come into your site tools and you can pin the ones that you want and get rid of the ones that you don't and when you're all done with that just come up here and click Save so what I want to do next is to install an SSL certificate to the domain to my website so basically it will have the HTTPS meaning that my website is secure and Google won't throw any error messages saying that that my website is unsecure if somebody wants to join my email list and they're filling out a form there'll be big warning messages all over the page saying that the information that they are about to sin is not secure and it could be read by a third party so I don't want that so I want to make sure that I install an SSL certificate so that my site will be secure and any information that is sent through my website will be secure as well so I'm going to come over here where it says security click on that and then go down to SSL manager and click on that alright so now it's showing the domain name that I have and that's the one that I want to create the certificate for I come over here to where it says select SSL and I wanted to do a let's encrypt SSL so I'll click on that and then click get and right now it's going through it is installing the SSL certificate and I should get a message that it is a successful install all right and now it says the let's encrypt is installed forced against no marketing or sling and some consulting comm and you can either click to configure the HTTPS or click on back and then it appears down here where it says that this certificate will expire on January 24th of 2020 but you don't need to really worry about that it will automatically renew when that time comes so you won't have to set anything on your calendar and make sure that you come back it's already taken care of for you that's part of site grounds service and it's completely automatic the next thing that I want to do is I want to make sure that the HTTPS is enforced so I'll come over here to the left and click on the HTTPS and in the menu and it is showing that my SSL is active but I want the HTTP enforce active as well so I'll click on that and we can see that it is now enabled and what this does is it make sure that if anyone were to type in my web address without the HTTPS that this would automatically redirect it to the secure side of my website okay so now we have our domain name pointed to our hosting and we have our SSL certificate installed so our website is secure so now it's time to actually log into WordPress and start working on our website so I'm going to get out of the site tools by going up here to the upper left where it says to go to my account click on that now I am back to my site ground home and I'll click on websites and I have my sling and stone consulting website here and I'm going to click on WordPress kit and now it's showing a window of all of the different tools for WordPress but I want to go to the WordPress admin so I'll click on go and that takes me to the WordPress login screen so this is I'm going to insert the email address and password that I used when I set up the WordPress site through the creating a new site installation so I'll go ahead and put that in there and then click on login alright and now we are within our WordPress dashboard now this is a site ground plug-in for the WordPress starter site and basically what it does and it walks you through like a little setup wizard so I'm just going to go ahead and exit out of this okay and to make sure that you see the actual WordPress dashboard every time that you log in you're going to want to deactivate that site ground starter plugin so I'm gonna come over here to where it says plugins on the left click on that and here we see is the WordPress starter so I'm just gonna deactivate that so now when I sign into WordPress and I it takes me to the dashboard I'm just gonna see the regular WordPress dashboard it won't be anything fancy because if you look at any other WordPress tutorials and they're doing something on the dashboard you want to make sure that yours your screen looks like what their screen is going to be look like so that you can follow along so if we were to take a look at what our website looks right now you can come up here to where it says my WordPress and click on visit site and you'll see that there's really nothing here I mean it's it's really just boring and there's no template or anything installed so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back up here to where it says my WordPress and click on dashboard to get back to the wordpress dashboard and what we want to do is install a theme so it can be something that that is pre generated has a good layout already has all of the styling and the fonts and everything to make our website look good so I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna click on appearance alright and what is what that is showing me is it's the that I have the 2019 WordPress theme active right now just about every year WordPress the creators of WordPress come out with a new theme for the year and then they just name it the name of that year so you have 2019 2017 2016 so on and so forth but in my opinion the 2019 the way it is right now is pretty bland so I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to click on add new and what that will do is it'll bring me to the page showing the featured WordPress themes that people are using on their websites so you have things like this news prime this savant all of these different themes these are pretty popular right now and are being featured you can go through and you can take a look and get a preview of it so that you can see what your website might look like if it was using that theme so as you can see here this is kind of like a little Thai ode blog layout alright and if this is something that interests you then you can click on install and it will install that theme for you but what I like to do is just go through see if there's anything that looks good see if there's anything that kind of catches my eye but if you are wondering there is a theme that I do recommend the only reason why I recommend it is because I use a page builder on my websites called Elementor and this theme that I'm going to recommend is one that is built specifically to be very minimalistic very lightweight and specifically used for page builders and the name of that theme is Astra which is a Stra I will also put a link in the description below so that you can go directly to their website you can download it they do offer a pro version which comes with some extra features but you can also just use the free version which gives limited features which is good enough for most people so I'm going to come over here and click install alright and now that it's installed I'll click on activate alright so now I have a new theme installed so to take a look at what my website looks like now I'll come back up here to where it says my WordPress and I'll click visit site and this is now the Astra theme it's pretty basic but again like I said I use this for a page builder so it's very minimalistic to begin with to keep it very very lightweight and focused on performance and speed so that it gets out of the way and allows the page builder to work at its best so it's not going to offer very much in terms of style and layout just by itself because you're going to be doing a lot of that through the through the page builder so I'm going to now go back up to where it says my WordPress and click on dashboard so now the fun begins we get to go through and we're going to choose a template to use on our Ashworth iime that is the layout and the style that we actually like so now we don't have to worry about choosing Dib changing out different themes we can actually just change out the template but keep the Astra theme exactly the same keep it lightweight keep it very available for beat for being used with a page builder so they have this thing called the starter site templates and if I open that up in another tab you take a look at what that looks like I intend to do a future video going through all of the Astra theme features both the free and the pro versions so make sure that you subscribe so that you'll be able to be notified when I post that video but if you take a look at this astra has already compiled some templates together that are ready to use and you just can import them very very easily so if we come down here we can see that they have templates made for the Elementor page Brill builder the beaver builder page builder breezy and Gutenberg Gutenberg is like the default text editor for WordPress so it uses blocks and they really redesigned WordPress about a year or so ago and so now it's using this Gutenberg interface that's using blocks and it allows you to kind of build your content to together not quite in the same way as like Elementor or beaver builder but it's good to see that astra is taken into account people who might not be using page builders and want to do everything within WordPress itself and so they've come up with some templates for the for the Gutenberg interface so if that's for you you can just click on Gutenberg take a look at these different templates that Astra has built in and that you can import very easily so let's say for instance if you want to do health and fitness or if you're a plumber or if you have a blog that's into fashion and lifestyle you can you know go through these take a look if you see one that kind of catches your eye like this interior interior designer you can go over and click on quick view and that will take you to a website that has the template loaded and you can go through and you can take a look at what it all looks like how the layout is the fonts you know you click on the different pages see what the about page looks like services so you can get an idea of exactly what your website can look like if you were to use this template so after you're done you can go ahead and close out of that I'm going to come up here and go back to the dashboard and what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually install the Astra starter sites plugin so then that way if I see a template on a sure that I'm interested in using for my website I will use that plug-in to bring it and import it into and use it on my website so I'm going to come over here and click on get started and then I'm going to choose Elementor the reason being is because that is the page builder that I use on my websites and I highly recommend it I'm going to put a link in the description below so that you can check it out for yourself there is a free version that you can use which comes with a lot of features already but they do offer a pro version which with even more features that you can use especially if you are into using a what your website as a business it comes with a bunch of different business and marketing tools that you can use they are probably the fastest growing page builder plug-in on WordPress right now so I'm going to use them but you're more than welcome to use the Gutenberg or beaver builder or even the breezy options depending on what it is that you want to use on your website I'm gonna click on next so what that will do is it will take me to the Astra starter sites page where I see the same templates that I would see on the Astra website but they're now here within my WordPress installation and I can go through and I could take a look at all of these different templates so for instance if I'm a nutritionist and I there's a nutritional list template if you're a dentist you might want to take a look at the dental clinic if you're a law firm they do have a template but as you can see here it says agency so that means that you would need to actually purchase the agency level of the pro Astra theme so they have I think like three levels there's kind of a starter level which comes with a lot of features that you get over the free version and then they have two agency packages so you need to have at least one of those packages agency packages in order to use this template because that means that it has features that are only with those plans so you can go through and you can take a look at all of these different templates and if you see one that you like let's see this this real estate one kind of sticks out to me if you hover over it then it'll show you kind of what the home page would look like you know just without clicking on the preview but if you really want to see what it looks like then click on preview alright and now you can really get a good sense of what it like you can take a look at the fonts and the colors and see how the images are in the layout so you know being a real estate agent if I were to take a look at this you know I would like to see you know I get to put in some really nice pictures I can say if it's for rent or for sale if it's residential you know how much it will be per month and some of the features there so this really really looks good so I think I'm gonna go with this one if I'm a real estate agent this catches my eye I like the colors I like the layout of it I like that I you know where I can put all the different information there and if I look over here to the left you'll see that it tells me that I need to install some required plugins if I click on the question mark this is that I need to install Elementor which is fine because I chose that I was going to be using element or as my page builder and then there's another one that needs to be installed called WP forms light which is fine all of these templates are made using free versions of plugins if there is a pro version you only need to use the free version so you won't have to come out of pocket to use any of these templates so you don't need to worry about choosing a template that requires you to purchase another plugin this will also import any customizer settings automatically and it will also import content if you want these are optional optional I would leave them check so that at least you would have something there and then all you need to do is just go in and change the text or maybe swap out images but you'll have a fully functioning website like once you import it all and then of course if you have another imported site that you've imported before then you would want to check that you delete any previously imported sites so I'm going to uncheck that since I don't have another imported site already and I'm going to click on import site so it's installing the plugins automatically it's importing the custom settings and the content alright now we're done and we can click on view site alright and now our website is pretty much done I would say that we're like 80% of the way there all we need to do now is just go in and change things to make it personalized for our business or our website so things like changing out the phone number changing out the logo there we want to put our company logo or blog logo there you know so things like that editing the text here so to get rid of this kind of placeholder text so in order to do that what you want to do is you want to come up here and to the top where it says edit with Elementor and you want to click on that and what that's going to do is it's going to load Elementor for you which is the page builder and we'll be able to make changes to the website on the fly and we'll be able to see exactly what our website will look like while we're working on it alright so say for instance that I want to change out the telephone number so I'll come down here I'll click on the telephone number and I can either edit it right here or I can come over here to the left and edit it in this little box here so no matter any changes that I make here it will show up live over here we're showing the preview of our site so I can change that number to five five five one two three four all right once we've made our changes we'll click update and it will update the website now if we want to change other text on the page like here where it says click edit button just click there and I can make my changes here just highlight this text let's get rid of that and I'll type in something here and again you can make your changes either here on the page or over on the left in the text box so once you go through and you make all of the changes and you're happy with the way that your website looks you always want to make sure that you click update and when you're done you can actually just preview the page to see what it will look like without all of these boxes and to do that you're gonna come over here to where's the hamburger icon to bring up the menu and then you're going to come down and click view page so take you out of Elementor and back to your live page so you can see what it looks like the phone number is changed we changed the text down here so it looks good if you want to go through and make changes on other parts of the page you can go ahead and go back into Elementor and make your changes there if you want to go to another page like the about us if you want to edit that you click on that to go directly to that page come up here to the top and click on edit with Elementor again and then that will load Elementor for that page and once it's loaded you just go to the section that you want to change for instance the responsibilities section I can put in whatever text I want there about my company's responsibility or global presence and when I'm done just click update and it will update it on the website so it's really easy it saves you a lot of money because you don't need to pay a designer to design your entire website for you and then pay a web developer to build it out for you in WordPress and using the elemental page builder allows you to just go in and change pretty much anything that you want on the page so it's a very powerful plugin that's why I highly recommend it and again if you want to check it out I put a link in the description now let's say for instance that you want to change the logo that's that's on your website well you don't do that within Elementor what you're going to do is you're going to do that through the customizer that's built into WordPress so the way that we get there is we're going to come out of Elementor by going up to the then clicking on that hamburger icon again and then we're going to go back down to where it says view page to take us out of Elementor and back to our live page and then we're going to go up to the top and we're going to click on customize now what this will do is it'll open up the WordPress customizer where you can change settings for your themes so again we're using the Astra theme so this is where you would change the theme settings the page builder pretty much takes care of everything in-between the header which is where your logo and the menu is going to be and the footer which is where you have like your footer links your copyright and things like that so the page builder takes care of everything that's in between there which is called the body of the text so if you want to make changes to the header things in the header or things in the footer you're going to use the WordPress customizer to make those changes because that's what the theme controls so in order to change your logo what we're going to do is come over here to the left and the customizer menu and click on header because our logo is in the header and then we're going to go to site identity and then we can see the logo that we have already imported that came along with this template that we imported through the astrocytes and all we need to do is just go in and change the logo it will open up another window where you can drop in your file or you can select a file from your computer it shows that the maximum upload file size is 128 megabytes so you want to make sure that the size of the file of the image that you use is less than that which it should be especially if you are using the suggested image dimensions of 180 pixels by 60 pixels so once you import your own image then it will replace the logo that you have and then you also want to make sure that you replace the retina logo you can either remove it if you don't have a retina logo basically all it is is a higher resolution so that screens that have the the Retina screen and displays in a higher resolution it will still show up crisp and clear on those screens as well so you would do the same thing is just click on change image select the file or just drag it and drop it here in the window click on choose image and it will replace that for you and then again any changes that you make you want to make sure that you publish it and it will also show up in the live preview here and then one nifty little thing that they have in the customizer is that you can take a look at what your website will look like on a desktop on a tablet and on a mobile phone so when you change out your logo you want to make sure that it still looks proper on those three devices so in order to see that you would just come down here at the bottom left and there's a little desktop icon so right now it's showing what your website will look like on the desktop and then right next to it is the tablet so you would click on the tablet icon and then it shrinks the page to a tablet size and this is what the website will look like on a tablet and then if you move over again you can take a look and see what it looks like for mobile so this way you can take a look at what your website will look like on the different devices and make sure that everything is set properly and working the way that it should so I'm going to go back to the desktop and again any changes that you make make sure that you click publish so that they will be pushed live and they can be seen by the public and once you're done with that come over here and click X to exit out of the WordPress customizer and now you're back to your website thank you so much for taking your time to watch this video if you found this tutorial helpful make sure that you give it a thumbs up and subscribe and if you followed along with this video and got your website set up the way that you like it use the hashtag giant-slayer in the comments below it'll let me know that I helped you out and overcoming this obstacle that was standing in your way and until the next video and go out and slay some Giants

Channel: Sling & Stone Marketing

Views: 26,958

Keywords: siteground wordpress, siteground wordpress tutorial, siteground wordpress setup, siteground wordpress hosting, siteground wordpress migration, wordpress installation siteground, siteground for wordpress, wordpress installation, wordpress installation tutorial for beginners, siteground setup, wordpress setup, siteground install wordpress, wordpress hosting, siteground hosting, siteground ssl, siteground web hosting, siteground tutorial, siteground, create a website, web hosting

Id: 8c3QupBIVfA

Length: 40min 6sec (2406 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019