In the first half of 2022, WordPress is powering 43% of websites on the web. This is by far the most popular CMS platform that is commonly used by business owners, entrepreneurs, but also big cats. WordPress was built with a focal point on ease of use and a level of simplicity that entrepreneurs or bloggers (site owners) can design and maintain the site powered by it, and this is one of the main reasons why more people use it each year.
How to start building your WordPress site?
Starting up a WordPress site means purchasing a domain and a plan on a proper WordPress hosting provider. On some hosting providers, you can get WordPress automatically installed, while on some you have to do it manually. Previously, we covered these topics in this article.
After you have these basic steps completed, you can dive into the ocean of WordPress themes, plugins, page builders, and other add-ons. There are hundreds of tutorials out on the web on how to use WordPress and related products, but if you prefer to get a free hands-on approach and take it for a spin, you can do it at TasteWP.com.
What is TasteWP?
TasteWP is a free service that can spin up a free WordPress site in a couple of seconds and with just as few clicks. You can get your free WordPress site without even logging in, but being a registered user of this service brings several advantages. Each registered user can have up to 6 active sites, that can last up to 7 days, after which they are automatically deleted.
The exception here is non-expiring sites, that each user can earn with an affiliate program. TasteWP affiliate program works simply: each registered user gets the (customizable) affiliate code (link) that is used to invite friends. For every 3 friends who sign up through this affiliate link, the user will earn 1 non-expiry site for, with a maximum of 3 non-expiry sites in total.
We got a word from Inisev, the team that created TasteWP, that users will soon be able to expand standard limits on the duration and size of the sites, with the upcoming premium features.
These free test sites are ideal for getting familiar with WordPress, and in fact, a number of teachers and students from around the world are already using it for this purpose (TasteWP is translated into 20 languages). TasteWP is also a safe ground for checking out any plugin and theme before using it on your live site. In regards to this, TasteWP is often used as a staging environment, where users tweak and experiment with copies of their live sites, completely carefree.
TasteWP is completely friendly toward absolute beginners, but experienced WordPress developers can get more out of the service – on the advanced setup screen, they can define PHP and WP versions, include WP debug and save its log, switch between WP cron and alternate WP cron, disable automatic updates and cache, and more.
Each logged-in TasteWP user has access to a Dashboard that provides a clear overview of existing websites, where it is easy to hop into the site’s admin area, remotely disable all plugins of the test site, and change the PHP version on the go, or delete a site.
Your First Steps with WordPress
OK, so you’ve got your first WordPress site up and running. Getting familiar with WordPress Dashboard, arranging some settings, and learning the difference between the Post and a Page is probably all due on the first day, but people are often far too eager to jump straight to designing and shaping up their websites.
Let’s get down to the design, and use the most popular page builder – Elementor, and the most popular theme, that we already wrote about – Astra. With the help of the Starter Templates plugin, you will be able to easily go through design variations and get some inspiration on how your site could look. In addition, another popular page builder is available on the following TasteWP demo link, Beaver Builder, so you have even wider design possibilities:
https://demo.tastewp.com/astra-beaver-elementor
While the website got to have the looks, there is probably a lot more in the functionality and the user experience. Tens of thousands of plugins are available that can make site visitors’ experience smooth, but also make the webmasters’ work more comfortable. On average, a WordPress site has about 25-30 plugins installed.
Some of the essential plugins for every WordPress site include these categories: SEO optimization (Yoast or Rank Math), backup (UpdraftPlus or Backup Migration), contact form (Contact form 7 or FluentForm), a redirection (by John Godley or by Inisev), image optimization (Smush or ShortPixel), security (Wordfence or Jetpack). Depending on the purpose of your site, you will probably need a dozen more plugins, for example, if you plan to have a forum, you will probably use bbPress and BuddyPress.
The biggest library of plugins is the WordPress’ official directory, and they are all free to use. While you are browsing plugins there, you can test them with one click only, thanks to a brilliant feature developed by TasteWP: magic bookmark, which is basically a browser bookmark that will spin up a new test site with the plugin from the page, e.g. from https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/.
Conclusion
Building a website from the scratch by yourself used to be hardly imaginable if you are not a developer. Nowadays, with WordPress, all of what it usually takes is some time and enthusiasm. TasteWP can help you to learn to use WordPress, build up a site, and also maintain it because doing so on a staging site is much safer and more practical than on a live site. Applying the changes back to the live site, and migrating the site, in general, is easy with the help of the Backup Migration plugin that comes as an integral part of each TasteWP site. Get a taste of WordPress for free now on TasteWP.
