You might find building your own website fulfilling, but unless you know a lot of code, you’ll probably find publishing much on the web frustrating if not impossible. Even if you have advanced coding skills, you’ll find that building your own website and content management system will take a quite a long time.

Thankfully, there’s a completely free open source publishing system you can use to power a website or blog: WordPress. Its usability, and being free, make it the most popular content management system on the web, powering over 75 million websites. It’s also very easy to install - you don’t need to know anything about web coding.

There are really two options for using WordPress - create a website on WordPress.com, or self host a website. It’s really very easy to create a website on WordPress.com, as there are step by step instructions, but the downside is there will be limits on flexibility and how much you can upload. This tutorial is about how to host your own installation of WordPress, as it’ll give you much more freedom to scale and customise your website later on.

Domain and hosting

The first step to host WordPress is to ensure you have both a domain and hosting, and that the domain is pointing at the correct nameserver. If you’ve purchased both from the same provider, then it’s simpler. This process is explained in How to build your own website.