Bluehost WordPress Tutorial 2026: Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Hey, my name is Dan and in this tutorial I'll show you how to set up your WordPress website using Blue Host. First, I'll walk you through how to create your Blue Host account and make sure that you get the best available price for hosting your WordPress website. Once that's done, we'll set up your domain and then we'll install WordPress. After that, I'll show you how to get free access to hundreds of professionally designed website templates that are fully customizable and mobile friendly. Then I'll guide you step by step on how to customize these templates using Elementor, the popular drag and drop page builder for WordPress. Best of all, everything we'll use in this tutorial is free, except for the hosting with Blue Host. However, if you sign up using our special partner link for Blue Host, you'll get a much lower price than what you'd find on their homepage. You'll find that special sign up link in the video description below, so be sure to use that link when signing up to save some money. Let's select a hosting plan and domain. Now, this offer includes a free domain for the first year. And to take advantage of that, click get started. Now, here we see the Blue Host plans. Everything you'll see in this tutorial, you can do with the basic plan. So, I'll click choose plan. When you register a new domain, you want to make it relatively short and memorable, and it needs to still be available. I'll call this one BHWP tutorial 2, short for Blue Host WordPress tutorial. And then you can change your top level domain here if you want, but I'd recommend keeping a.com. I like to add domain privacy and protection to avoid junk mail, but I'll show you how to remove this later if you change your mind. Now, click search for domain. In our cart, you can change your hosting plan, but 1 year is the best monthly rate. And here is where you can remove that protection if you change your mind. I'll continue to check out. Now just enter your contact information and then scroll down to enter your account information. Double check that everything looks okay and click submit payment. Now that we have set up our hosting and we have our domain, it's time to install WordPress. And just like that, after submitting payment, WordPress is automatically installed and we've landed in the Blue Host dashboard. You can use this button to log into WordPress, but let me show you how to get there just in case you close this pop-up window. I'll close it. And by default, we are on the hosting tab. This edit site button will take you to the same place. Or if you visit the websites tab, clicking edit site here will launch WordPress as well. And then here on this page, select that you are following a tutorial. And now we've arrived at the WordPress admin dashboard. This is your website's back end, the place you'll come back to when you want to make a change, publish a page, or install something new. Before we start designing, let's quickly clean up this dashboard and adjust a few settings so that your WordPress admin dashboard is free of clutter. Click dashboard under the Blue Host section in the left menu to go home. Let's first clear out these tiles and messages. I'll dismiss the welcome banner, and then I'll open screen options. Here, I'm going to uncheck all of the screen elements. You can always add ones back in later if you'd like. Then I'll collapse my screen options. To remove some of these notifications, I'll go to the plugins tab. We'll come back here later, but for now, I'll select Creative Mail, Monster Insights, Jetack, Optin Monster, and Yoast SEO. I'll click bulk actions, then deactivate. and apply. All right, much better. The next important thing we have to do is install our theme, which will give our website the basic structure. A theme controls the colors, fonts, and layouts. And we'll install a popular free theme called Astra. And Astra is a theme that works great with the tool that we'll use next, Elementor's starter templates. From our dashboard, hover over appearance and then click themes. Then click add theme. In the top right, search for Astra. Then hover over it and click install. Once it's done installing, click activate. Next, I'm going to show you how to get access to hundreds of free website templates that are fully customizable using a plugin. A plugin works like an app for your website. It adds new features just like apps do on your phone. Click on plugins. I'll close this window. Then go over to add plugin. Search plugins for starter templates. When you see this one, you can click install. Once it's done installing, click activate to open starter templates. Here, click build with templates. If you don't see Elementor as an option, please check out the video linked in the card in the top right, which will show you how to fix this. And then select Elementor as our page builder. Starter Templates lets you build and edit pages using simple drag and drop tools. It gives you many ready-made designs to choose from, and we'll use one that's totally free. Now, let's pick a template for your website. A template gives you a complete layout with pages already designed. So, what's the difference between a theme and a template? A theme, like Astra, controls the overall look of your entire website, things like fonts, colors, and layout. A template only controls the layout of one specific page, like your homepage or about page. You can still change anything later, but choosing a good template gives us a great starting point. As you scroll, you'll see a few of these that are marked as premium. And if you click on any one of these, you can get a preview. If you aren't sure, click this X to return to the previous page. You can browse by category if you find that helpful, but this one caught my eye earlier and I'll select that. If you have a site logo already, you can upload that here, but I'll show you how to do that later if you don't have one yet. And then you can choose a font pair and color palette here as well. When you're ready, click continue. Instead of selecting features, I'll click skip this step. And I'll skip and continue here. And finally, check that you understand and click submit and build my website. Your website may take just a few minutes to build. Once it's finished, click here to visit your website. With your template installed and your site built, you can explore and navigate around, but it's time to use the Elementor page builder to change what's on your website. Elementor is a drag and drop builder. That means that you can click on something like text or an image and just change it right on the screen. You can close this tab and in the WordPress admin bar, click edit with Elementor. I'll walk you through each step using Elementor so that you can feel confident editing your site anytime. Each page is structured into containers. If we hover over these sections, we can see them outlined in magenta. And we have container handles here as well. This structure panel is helpful to quickly select containers on our page. And if you toggle the visibility of containers that can help you identify them. I'll hide the structure panel for now by using command I on a Mac keyboard or controlI on a Windows keyboard. Let me scroll down. And to add a new container, hover over an existing container and click on this plus icon. That will show you options to add new content. To move a container, hover over an existing container until it shows the container handle, then drag it into a new position on the page. To remove any container, simply click on the X. Containers hold the elements that make up the content of the page, like headings, text, buttons, and images. If I reopen my structure panel using command I, we can see the elements nested within the containers here. Let's look at how to edit these elements. To edit that text, just select any text on the page and simply change the text. We can also edit the text over here on the left. When we click style and then click edit typography, we can edit the style of this text element. And we have lots of control over different settings. This works the same way for our buttons. Click on this button and you can make changes here on the left. I'll change the text to say view destinations. And of course, you can style your buttons as well. I'll change my button font color here. To change an image, simply click on the image, then select choose image on the left and upload your new image here. I'll select a new file. And when it's done uploading, select again. In the style tab on the left side, you have many options to make changes to the position and alignment of your image. To make changes to other pages on our website, click the page drop down in the top bar and select a different page. Once we're on the new page, we can edit elements in the exact same way. To add an entirely new page to our website, open a new tab and type in your domain. When you're logged into your WordPress account, you'll be able to see the WP admin bar up here at the top. In the WordPress admin bar, click new, then page. Here, we can rename our page and then click publish. If we view our page, it's just bare bones for now. To edit this new page, click edit page, then edit with Elementor. Then you can use the drag and drop functionality to build your page by dragging in the widgets found on the left. I can add and then edit a heading. Then I can add another element and I can drag in an image. And then I can upload a new image there just like we've done before. To speed things up dramatically, you could also import a template from the template library. Scroll down and click the starter templates icon and then find a page that you'd like to import. If you want, you can search. I'll type outdoor. Select one you like. Then click import template. After that imports, remove any containers that you don't need. And then you can publish the changes and preview your page if you would like. Now, this new page cannot yet be found in our navigation menu. To add it, click customize, select menus, and then main menu. We can click add items, and then we can select our new page to add it to the menu. And we can publish once more. Finally, let's see how we can edit the header and footer. While we're still in this customization section, hover over the pencil icons and click that to edit our header elements. The outer icon will allow us to change the header height. If we click on the inner edit icon, we can change or rearrange the other header elements. To change the logo, for example, click change image and upload a new logo. And your website footer works in the same way. If we scroll all the way to the bottom, we can click that pencil and that will allow us to edit the footer elements just like we did with the header. Now you know how to set up your WordPress website with Blue Host and you can customize your website content using Elementor. If you haven't been following along already, remember that using the link in the description will get you our special partner offer for Blue Host. Thanks for watching.