Building a website with Bluehost is now easier than ever. In fact, you can get your website built within a few minutes with this how to build a website with Bluehost beginner’s guide.
One of the great things about building a website with Bluehost is you don’t need to be an advanced programmer or coding expert to build your own website.
You might be asking yourself, how is this possible? Bluehost offers easy to use website builders allowing you to build and create your website within minutes.
As one of the largest website hosting providers, Bluehost powers over two million sites and is officially recommended by WordPress.org. Driving Bluehost’s popularity is its affordable pricing, extensive documentation and support, and reputation for high performance and reliability among bloggers in the WordPress community.
Bluehost particularly appeals to beginners because it offers the basic necessities for getting a WordPress site live. With plans starting at $2.95 a month, 24/7 live chat support, and a free SSL certificate and domain name included for the first year, bloggers and small businesses can get their blog started.
Bluehost recently updated their checkout page to get your website installed automatically so you can start building your website in no time.
Why Choose Bluehost For Building Your Own Website
Before we get started, I want to go over a little about Bluehost and why choosing them is a good choice when building your site.
Bluehost powers over 2 million websites and over 850,000 blogs around the world. They have a 99.9% up time guarantee meaning you don’t have to worry about your site going down.
Bluehost offers a 30-day money back guarantee, and they provide 24/7 customer support. Another great thing about Bluehost is they are cost effective.
For as low as $2.95 you can get your Bluehost hosting along with a free domain name. I don’t know about you but getting something for free is exciting! Click here to get your Bluehost discount plus a free domain name.
How To Build A Website With Bluehost
Let’s get started with our guide on how to build a website with Bluehost. To start out, we want to sign up with Bluehost.
Click here to open up Bluehost to get your hosting plus a free domain name. You will be on the Bluehost home page. Click the green get started button.
You will now be on the Bluehost page where you can choose between four different Bluehost plans. You can choose between a Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and a Pro plan.
The Basic plan works fine for most. This plan is good if you are only going to have one website.
If you want to have unlimited email accounts or if you have more than one website you’d want to go with the Plus plan. The Plus plan comes with Spam Experts and a free 30 day trial of Office 365 mailbox.
Spam Experts is an email filtering system that will scan emails coming in to make sure there are no viruses or spam coming in.
The Office 365 mailbox is optional, but it might be worth giving a try if you go with this plan.
The Choice Plus plan comes with all the features that the Plus plan comes with and more. The Choice Plus plan comes with the additional Bluehost add-ons Domain Privacy + Protection and Site Backup – Codeguard Basic.
Domain Privacy + Protection keeps your personal contact information safe not letting it get out to where telemarketers can contact you selling you their services or spammers.
Site Backup – Codeguard Basic is an add-on that backups your site daily and allows you to restore your site with a click of a button. If something happens to your site you can easily get it back to the way it was.
The Pro plan I don’t recommend from the get-go. I recommend upgrading to this plan if you need to once your traffic and revenue grows. The Pro plan comes with everything that the Choice Plus plan comes with and a Dedicated IP and 2 Spam Experts allowing two of your email addresses to have a spam filter.
The next step in our how to build a website with Bluehost guide is to pick out a free domain name. You will see where you can choose and create a new domain, enter a domain name that you already own, or create a domain name later.
If you choose to create your free domain name later you can do so from your Bluehost account. If you already have your own domain name from another provider you can type it in and click the next button.
Next, I’ll walk you through getting your free domain name. Input a domain name that you would like. You will see where you can pick out your domain extension where you see the .com dropdown.
I recommend you go with a .com if you can as this is the most popular domain extension. Most people refer to sites with .com so it can make it easier for your site visitors to find you if they are typing in your specific URL.
The domain extension .net is another popular and good domain extension to use. The domain extension you go with though is entirely up to you. Click the next button when you have a domain name that you want.
Bluehost will now let you know if the domain name you chose is available or not. If it’s available it’ll say available.
If your domain is unavailable it’ll let you know. If your domain name is unavailable you can search for a new one. If you want to have the domain name you entered you could try using a different domain extension, adding a -, adding another word to the domain name.
I do want to mention that if you purchased your domain name from another provider, you would need to point your nameservers to Bluehost.
If you bought your domain name with GoDaddy here’s a post going over how to point your GoDaddy domain to Bluehost. Purchased your domain name from Namecheap? Here’s a post going over how to point your Namecheap domain to Bluehost.
Next, in our how to build a website with Bluehost guide is to put in your account information.
Right under the account information section, you will see package information.
Next, we want to choose a hosting term. Click on the dropdown next to account plan.
Account plan is where you will choose your hosting term. You’ll see 12, 24, or 36 months. You will see the price per month is cheaper the farther out you purchase your Bluehost hosting for.
You will see that the domain name registration is free along with Let’s Encrypt SSL.
If you aren’t familiar with what SSL is, SSL protects your customer’s information such as their password, username, and credit card information from malicious hackers.
Search engines like Google will rank sites higher that are using SSL as this is one of the ranking factors. To know if a site is secure or not you can go to a site and look in the browser and you will see HTTPS instead of HTTP before the domain name along with a green lock icon.
You will now see a few add-on services that Bluehost offers under the next section Package Extras. These are entirely up to you to get. You can add any of them at a later date if you aren’t sure on them now.
Domain Privacy + Protection I highly recommend. The Domain Privacy + Protection keeps your personal contact information secure not showing it on the web where telemarketers and spammers can get ahold of it. With the Domain Privacy + Protection add-on Bluehost’s information will be shown and not yours.
Codeguard Basic is an add-on that will backup your site daily and allows you to restore your site with a click of a button. If something happens to your site you can just restore it to a previous version where your site was okay.
Bluehost SEO Tools Start is an add-on that will provide you a personalized marketing report so that you can optimize your site to help with ranking for keywords. Bluehost SEO Tools Start will also automatically submit your site to search engines.
I do want to note that your site will be indexed and crawled by Google and other search engines on its own without the automatic submission. I don’t recommend this Bluehost add-on but you might find the report and helpful advice it gives you regarding the SEO of your site helpful.
The add-on Office 365 mailbox isn’t really necessary. You might find this useful if you want to have your email account in Microsoft Outlook and love the design of it.
The next add-on is Sitelock Security-Essential. Sitelock Security-Essential protects your site from malware and malicious attacks.
Next, in our guide on how to build a website with Bluehost, you want to enter your payment information. Make sure you select the I have read and agreed to Bluehost’s Terms of Service. Click the green submit button.
Bluehost is going to email you your Bluehost login credentials along with some welcome emails. One of the emails Bluehost will ask you to verify your domain name.
Make sure you do this, so your domain name doesn’t get canceled at a later date. If you purchased your domain name from another company, you don’t need to worry about this email.
Next, in our how to start a website using Bluehost guide, you will be asked to create a password. Click the create your password button.
You now want to enter a password that you would like to use for WordPress. WordPress is the Bluehost website builder that I will be using in this how to build a website with Bluehost guide.
Don’t want to build your website on Bluehost with WordPress? No problem. Bluehost currently offers over 55 website builders to build your site with. Login to Bluehost’s Cpanel to choose another website builder. I provide a screenshot of Bluehost’s Cpanel and what it looks like later on in this post.
Here’s a complete list of the 55 Bluehost website builders
WordPress
Weebly
GoMobi
Xoops
Joomla 2
Joomla 3
Drupal 7
Drupal 6
B2evolution
Croogo
OCPortal
MODx
Concrete5
LiveSite
phpwcms
PHP-Nuke
Textpattern
PyroCMS
e107
Geeklog
AnchorCMS
Chyrp CMS
Noah’s Classified
Open Classifieds
ShopSite
PrestaShop
CubeCart
OSCommerce
Magento
OpenCart
TomatoCart
ZenCart
AgoraCart
Moodle
Chamilo 1
Chamilo 3
LimeSurvey
Simple Machines Forum
Vanilla Forums
My BB
phpBB
PunBB
Coppermine
Piwigo
Zenphoto
Gallery
4Images
Oxwall
Elgg
Pligg
MediaWiki
PmWiki
Tiki Wiki 9 LTS
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
DokuWiki
Final Word
Price, security, performance, and upgrade options are important features to consider when selecting a hosting provider for your WordPress blog. With competitive prices, robust security features, and uptimes and load times that outperform the industry average, Bluehost will suit small businesses and individual bloggers who are entering the space.
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