How To Build A Website With Bluehost
Last Updated on July 7, 2023
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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.
Bluehost recently updated its 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 Bluehost 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% uptime 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.
Video Tutorial: How To Build A Website With Bluehost
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.
You’ll see the cost of Bluehost runs for as low as $2.95 a month.
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 it 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 add-ons Bluehost Domain Privacy + Protection and Bluehost Codeguard Basic.
Bluehost 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.
Bluehost 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 buttton.
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 Bluehost 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 called Bluehost 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 about 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 Bluehost 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
Why Start A WordPress Website With Bluehost
Some things I want to point out about why you should choose WordPress for building your website is WordPress is used not only by this blog but by fortune 500 companies around the world.
WordPress now powers over 30% of websites, and that number is growing every year. As you can see these are some excellent reasons why you should install and setup WordPress on Bluehost. I recommend WordPress as your Bluehost website builder.
Let’s continue with our guide on how to build a WordPress blog on Bluehost.
How To Build A WordPress Website With Bluehost
You will see a congratulations page after you created your password for WordPress. Click the blue login button to continue choosing a free WordPress theme for your site.
Bluehost will now give you a selection of some excellent free WordPress themes to choose from for your website. Under these, you will see a skip button. Feel free to skip this step if you would like. If you see one that you want you can choose that one and you can always change it a little later on.
A great place to find free WordPress themes is WordPress.org. Their directory has hundreds of free themes to choose from for your website.
A little later in this how to build a website with Bluehost guide I will show you how you can choose free WordPress themes right in WordPress.
If you find yourself struggling with customizing and building your WordPress website on Bluehost, Themeforest is a great site where you can get premium WordPress themes that look like an award-winning design agency designed your site. I recommend you check them out.
Click here to checkout Themeforest!
After you choose a free WordPress theme from Bluehost or you skip the step you will see a page that says you’re all set, start building. Click the start building button to continue building your WordPress website using Bluehost.
You will now be in the WordPress dashboard. You will get asked a few questions. If you don’t need any help, you can select the option that says you don’t need any help.
You’ll now see some Bluehost tools in the WordPress dashboard. These tools are extremely helpful when you are building your website on Bluehost.
You can add new website pages, blog posts, add Woocommerce if you plan on selling products, and can customize your site’s menu.
A button should pop up that says launch your blog. You can easily name your site title and site description here.
On the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard, you will see tabs you can choose from. You can easily add new site pages, blog posts, read comments from your blog posts, add images to your website, etc.
Find Appearance in the left menu. Hover over it, and you will see Themes. Click Themes.
Next, click add new to pull up free WordPress themes to choose from.
You will see free WordPress themes you can browse and choose from. There are thousands of themes to choose from. You can search through featured, most popular, latest themes, favorites you have marked as a favorite, and by searching in the search box to the right.
A theme I recommend for building your WordPress website with Bluehost is Astra.
Astra has a bunch of free website templates that you can choose from for building your website with Bluehost. They have paid templates as well. Here’s just a few out of the many of the free templates shown below.
Click here to check out Astra!
When you find a theme you like, hover over the theme and click install.
Once the theme is done installing click activate to activate the theme you chose.
If you purchase and download a Premium theme from Themeforest, you can upload the premium WordPress theme from the page where you can select from WordPress themes. Click the upload theme found at the top of the page.
You can now upload the theme from your computer.
How To Design A Website On Bluehost
Now I want to cover how to design a website on Bluehost. Designing a website on Bluehost isn’t difficult at all. I’ve provided helpful resources related to designing your website on Bluehost after I show you how to design your website on Bluehost.
Once you go with a WordPress theme you will now want to start customizing, designing, and building your website using the theme you chose.
To make creating your WordPress website on Bluehost nice and easy I recommend the most popular drag and drop editor Elementor. Elementor has over 4 million active installs and makes creating a website easy.
Elementor has a free and paid version. The paid version has more features but the free version is super valuable.
Click here to check out Elementor!
A great plugin to install to make a website on Bluehost go even smoother if you decide to use Elementor is Envato Elements – Photos & Elementor Templates. Here’s what the plugin looks like below.
They have over 100 free website templates to choose from.
The plugin also has a ton of pre-made template blocks to choose from for any kind of page for your website.
Here’s an example of a pre-made block template.
The last thing I want to go over in this guide on how to start a website with Bluehost is a screenshot of Bluehost’s Cpanel. This is what the Bluehost Cpanel will look like when you log into it. You can access your billing, nameservers, account information, free site builders, etc.
Lastly, I want to go over a helpful resource that will be helpful in this guide on how to start a website with Bluehost.
Another great resource that readers find helpful in our how to start a website with Bluehost guide is Fiverr. Almost any kind of task you need to be done you can get done for as low as $5. A lot of people find Fiverr helpful when it comes to designing business cards and logos.
This is the end of our step-by-step guide on how to start a website with Bluehost.
If you purchased the Plus, Choice Plus or Pro plan that allows unlimited websites check out our post on how to add an addon domain in Bluehost as it goes over how to add more than one website to your Bluehost account.
Click here if you haven’t already gotten your Bluehost hosting discount and free domain name.
Final Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed my beginner’s guide on how to build a website with Bluehost.
Let us know in the comments below if you liked this post! We would love to hear from you.
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