If you want to start a WordPress blog with little investment and reap maximum benefits, choosing Bluehost for your hosting needs will be highly beneficial. It is tried and tested by several bloggers worldwide and is strongly recommended.

Bluehost has a track record of being one of the top web hosting companies for WordPress hosting. Learn more about Web hosting and WordPress hosting. Moreover, Bluehost is recommended by WordPress itself, which is a testament to its reliability and popularity.

If you want to turn your penchant for blogs into money-making, you must get a self-hosted WordPress blog and pay for the hosting through services like Bluehost. It is not only unbelievably affordable but also provides you with a free domain. You can also run your ads, add affiliate links and directly advertise through the blog.

Before we get into how to start a WordPress blog on Bluehost, let’s take a look at the things required to start a blog.

What are the steps to create a WordPress blog on Bluehost?

To start a WordPress blog you need three things. Good quality web hosting, a catchy domain name and a website building platform (WordPress). With Bluehost, you can buy hosting and domain for your WordPress blog. You can either choose Shared hosting or pick specialised WordPress hosting for added benefits. All Bluehost hosting plans offer a FREE domain for 1 year and SSL protection for all blogs/websites. Once you purchase hosting and domain, all you need to do is download & install WordPress and get started with creating the blog you want.

A. Word Press Blogging: Things You Require to Start a Blog

To get your blog online, all you need is:

1. A hosting plan: This is the web server where all your blog files and data are stored. A blog hosting provider is alandlord for your blog. It gives your blog a virtual space to live on. A blog hosting provider will also allow you to get a domain name for your blog.

To buy web hosting, use these Bluehost hosting coupons.

2. A domain name: Domain name is what people type into their browser to find and visit a website/ The domain name (example.com), in simple terms, is the web address for your blog website. Ensure to choose a short and relevant domain name.

Purchase a domain at a discount with these Bluehost domain coupons.

3. A blogging platform: In this case, WordPress. A blogging platform is what you will utilize to build and manage your blog.

C. 4 Steps to Start a WordPress Blog on Bluehost

1. Register Domain Name

Your domain name is supposed to be one of the most important decisions you’ll make when starting your WordPress blog.

With Bluehost, you enjoy a free domain for the first year if you buy web hosting for 12 months. That’s why it is highly recommended that you sign up for at least 12 months to save a great chunk of money and reap more benefits for the cost!

To get a free domain, the next step is to buy hosting from Bluehost. The basic hosting package should be enough to begin with.

Read: Web Hosting vs Domain Name – The Difference

2. Buy Hosting for the Blog

Choosing the “basic” hosting plan is one of the easiest ways to start a blog.

You can get a 12-monthly plan by paying ₹279/per month. Moreover, if you go for a 12-month plan, your yearly cost would be just ₹3348 a year, unbelievable right? In addition, you get a domain name free and save more money if you go for the 24 months or 36 months plan.

The basic plan is enough for the starting out stage. Moving ahead, if you feel like you might need advanced plans, you can easily upgrade the same by paying an additional price.

On the other hand, it is effective and cost-saving to pay for more years all at once, as you get a year of blog hosting at around ₹279, and for 3 years, the price is ₹169, a great deal given all the benefits it comes with. If you want to get value for money, the 36 months plan is your best bet.

Follow these steps to purchase hosting for the blog:

To learn more, check out this blog on How to Purchase a Domain Name and Hosting With Bluehost

3. Connection Domain and Hosting

If you have purchased your domain name directly via Bluehost, you can skip this step and move to step number 4 directly. However, if you have brought your domain from other providers, you have to connect your domain to your hosting account.

4. Install WordPress on Bluehost

This is the finale! Once you are done creating your password, Bluehost provides an easy guide on how to start your WordPress blog.

You can also change the theme later so take your time and explore the beautiful theme options on WordPress. Most of the themes are easy to use and easily customizable.

Congrats! Your WordPress blog is ready!

Read: How To Install WordPress on Bluehost

WordPress is an open-source content management system that has become popular amongst individuals who want to build a website or a blog. WordPress does not cost anything; anyone can install, use and modify it. Plus, it doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

Initially, WordPress was used to create blogs, and fast-forward today, the software allows you to create any type of website you want. You can build lifestyle blogs, professional portfolios, business websites, mobile applications or membership sites. WordPress is one of the most loved platforms for many bloggers and businesses. Moreover, 40% of all websites use WordPress for their business.

Which are the best Popup Plugins For WordPress?

The list of popup plugins is quite vast. If you want to create customised popup forms, choose Elementor WordPress Popup Plugin, which is a premium plugin. Hubspot WordPress plugin, Popup Maker, Bloom WordPress Popup Plugin, and Icegram Popup Plugin are free options that can be upgraded if required. Ninja forms are excellent to create different variations of popup forms and come with A/B testing.

B. Best WordPress Popup Plugins

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

HubSpot offers a free WordPress popup plugin that offers several marketing tools, including CRM, live chat, and a user-friendly popup builder.

It is one of the best free WordPress popup plugins. There are paid plans as well that offer advanced marketing and sales features.

2. Popup Maker

If you’re looking for customisation options, Popup Maker might be the best WordPress popup plugin, as you can use the built-in editor to customise your popup’s position, size, and animations.

You can use the Popup Maker plugin for free, but you won’t be able to create exit-intent popups or use advanced targeting settings. To use these features, you need to upgrade to a premium plan that starts from $87 per year.

3. Elementor WordPress Popup Plugin

Elementor’s premium version comes with a popup builder that lets you visually customise each part of your popup using their code-free drag and drop editor.

The pricing of the Elementor Pro plugin begins at $49 per year.

4. Popup Builder by OptinMonster

OptinMonster’s Popup Builder is one of the top WordPress popup plugins available that lets you build various popups, including floating bars and slide-ins.

OptinMonster’s plugin plan starts at $9 per month. However, you will need a higher-tier plan if you want access to advanced functions.

5. Sumo

Sumo is one of the best options if you are looking for an affordable popup plugin. You can start using it for free and upgrade as required.

While the core plugin is free, you won’t be able to use advanced targeting methods. You also won’t have access to advanced email integrations like Salesforce, Keep, or HubSpot.

Sumo Pro costs approx. $39 a month.

6. Bloom WordPress Popup Plugin

Bloom WordPress Popup Plugin lets you show the popup after someone leaves a comment and allows you to show a popup after the checkout process finishes.

Bloom can be purchased by itself or as a part of the Elegant Themes membership. It costs $89 annually and $249 for lifetime access and updates.

7. Icegram Popup Plugin For WordPress

Icegram is one of the most popular WordPress popup plugins for lead generation.

Icegram can be used for free without advanced settings. Icegram Engage starts from $97 per year.

8. Convert Pro

Convert Pro gives you the benefit of a visual drag and drop builder alongside detailed trigger and targeting rules that rival SaaS tools like OptinMonster. Convert Pro is one of the most flexible WordPress plugins, when it comes to trigger and targeting rules.

It costs $89 for use on unlimited sites with one year of support and updates. While it costs $389 for lifetime updates & support and can be used on unlimited sites.

9. Brave Popup Builder Plugin

Brave is an all-in-one visitor conversion engine. It includes popups and other tools like quizzes, surveys, social share buttons, and more. Brave has a free version at WordPress.org. After that, the paid plans start at $59/per year for all features and use on a single site.

10. Popup add-on for Ninja Forms

Ninja Popups are an excellent choice if you want to create custom forms.

A regular Ninja Popup license costs $24, including six months of support.

One of the first things you need to do is secure your users accounts and actively monitor user roles and permission. It will help you manage the user access and grant them permission required for their designated roles.

Since WordPress powers over 39.5% of websites on the internet, we’ll talk about the user roles available in WordPress.

Now, let’s explore the other measures you have to take to protect your website against attacks and other vulnerabilities.

2. Update your Site Settings and Components:

Businesses and professionals using Content Management systems such as WordPress can check their site settings and update any if required.

WordPress users can review and update their site settings by carrying out the following actions:

Regardless of which CMS you use, you have to implement these tactics to ensure that your website is secure.

Also, remember to perform regular updates of website components such as themes, plugins, and other add-ons that are essential to the working of your website. It reduces the risk of cyber-attacks, ensuring your website remains secure from hackers.

So, don’t overlook a notification mentioning a new update for website elements. These days software makers tend to add new features and continuously fix bugs to make it better and provide the users with a better experience. When you ignore these updates, you not only leave your website vulnerable to attacks but also miss on new features.

4. Renew your website’s SSL Certificates

An up-to-date SSL Certificate has a lot of advantages for your websites, including an improved search ranking. An SSL Certificate uses encryption that ensures that hackers aren’t able to access the data in transit. If you let the SSL certificate lapse, it will remove the padlock from your URL. The change will instantly notice the visitor, who’ll suspect something is wrong. You might even lose a few visitors.

To buy an SSL Certificate for your website, use these Bluehost coupons

A website with an SSL certificate gets the HTTPS prefix in the URL. They also get the secure tag with a padlock that usually signifies that the website is secure to visit. Google has changed its algorithm to ensure that HTTPS enabled websites rank better to improve their security.

If your business website has an e-commerce store that needs to make a payment or any other services that need to accept payment, it needs to have an SSL Certificate. It is one of the primary requirements of PCI/DSS.

If you let the SSL certificate lapse, it will remove the padlock from your URL. The change will be instantly noticeable to the visitor, who’ll suspect something is wrong. You might even lose a few visitors.

High-resolution images have their benefits, unnecessarily uploading large files can adversely affect the speed of your WordPress websites. Images are one of the few multimedia components that make your website attractive. So, you have to optimize most of these components to ensure that your website speed doesn’t suffer.

Website is simply one of the concerns with unoptimized images. When you optimize your WordPress images, it, in turn, improves the user experience. Visitors are put off by websites that take too long to load and leave quickly. When your speed increases, your bounce rate improves as well. It will also help you save money on your WordPress upgrades. Optimizing images ensures that you won’t need to purchase additional storage unnecessarily. With optimized images, your website can rank better on google. Websites that load quicker get a preference over the slower loading websites.

So, let’s explore the three ways in which you can optimize images for WordPress websites.

1. Compress Your WordPress Images with Plugins and other Softwares:

One of the quickest ways to optimize images on WordPress is to compress them. Compressing images includes minimizing the file size while maintaining the quality of the image. In order to maintain the quality of the image, you have to perform lossless compression. With lossless compression, your images will not lose any data. Lossless compression packs data into smaller file sizes, usually half of the original file, making it easier to store data or transmit it. You can decompress the compressed file and recover the original image file without any data or quality loss.

Lossy compression, on the other hand, results in data loss. The compressed file cannot be restored to its original form after compressing it via the lossy method. It also affects the quality of the image.

The compressed images load quicker and thereby improve the website’s speed. You can use Image compression plugins to optimize your images with this technique.

Listed below are two of the best image compressor plugin for WordPress:

i) Tiny PNG:

One of the most commonly used WordPress compression Plugins, Tiny PNG, comes highly recommended. Upon installation, it will optimize individual images in your media library. Users can also manually do bulk image optimization of the existing image in your WordPress media library. It also automatically optimizes every new image you upload to your WordPress site. TinyPNG supports the following image formats: JPG, WEbP, and PNG.

ii) SMUSH:

Another highly recommended Image Optimizer, the Smush WordPress plugin, helps you compress and resize the images on your WordPress website. It does Lossless compression on an individual as well as bulk images. It is also an effective Image resizing tool, which we’ll shortly discuss. It can compress GIF, PNG, and JPEG files. The pro version has additional features that you should check out.

You can also try other Image Compression plugins such as Robin Image Optimizer, Image Optimization by Optimole, and WP Optimize.

3. Remove Unnecessary and Unused Images from the WordPress Media Library:

When you first start a website, you don’t realize the amount of media you’ll end up uploading to the website. The media, especially the images you upload, are stored in the WordPress media library. Not only do these images take up unnecessary space, but they also slow down your Website.

Websites that deal with products and services have to usually create new landing pages or advertisements supported by complementary images. These are usually high-quality images that take up a lot of space. Once the advertisement or landing page has run its course, it is usually deleted or replaced with another. It means an additional burden to your already stretched media library. It also means upgrading your WordPress package for more storage space, which might be an unnecessary expense.

Instead, you should spend a little time cleaning up the obsolete images, making space for newer content. Before you delete anything, get a local backup, so if you end up deleting an important image, you have the chance to recover it.

Go to your WordPress Media Library. You can navigate to it by selecting the Media option from the Dashboard and then clicking on Library. You can go through the images and delete the ones that are no longer necessary for the functioning of your website. You can also bulk select and delete.

You can also use Media cleaner plugins to help you clean your media library.

i) Media Cleaner

With the help of this Media Cleaner plugin, you can easily delete unused media and broken entries from your media library. The media cleaner is powered by a Database cleaner that ensures that the website will continue to work properly after the images are deleted. The plugin will also remind you to back up your data before making permanent changes to your website.

ii) DNUI (Delete Not Used Image):

DNUI isn’t as widely used as Media cleaner but is a good alternative to media cleaner. It detects the images that aren’t used and are simply taking up space in your media library. You can then delete those images and make space for new uploads.

The journey of WordPress, with its initial release in May 2003, to date, has been nothing short of incredible. WordPress powers millions of websites around the globe and is the #1 CMS platform chosen by developers to build a website.

From countless WordPress themes to abundant WordPress plugins, this open-source CMS provides all the features needed to build and grow a successful website.

Being a top content management system, WordPress offers robust security through consistent updates for WordPress core, themes and plugins. The best part, it offers SEO and social media integration, which helps businesses increase brand visibility and reach.

If you are curious about the growth of WordPress since its inception, then the below WordPress stats infographic highlights everything – right from WordPress usage statistics to plugins, themes and security statistics to WordPress version and community statistics. Check it out!

WordPress Statistics: Everything You Need To Know

1. WordPress Timeline: The History of WordPress

3. Growth of WordPress – Versions and Milestones

There are 40+ major versions released by WordPress since 2003. Beginning with WordPress 1.0, all major releases are named in honour of Jazz Musicians that the WordPress core developers admire. Out of all the releases, the WordPress 5.2 version is downloaded nearly 37 million times, and the latest WordPress 5.9 version “Baker” came out on January 25, 2022. Below are some of the major releases and their features.

5. WordPress Plugins Statistics

7. Automattic WordPress Stats

9. WordPress Community Statistics

Being an open-source project, WordPress has a vast community of diverse people from different backgrounds and various technical skills. The core leadership team is led by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, five lead developers, and several other core developers.

11. WordPress Competitors

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions