Wordpress Tutorial for Beginners 2026 - Step by Step

If you're looking to build your first WordPress website, but you don't know where or how to start, then you clicked on the right video. This 10-minute guide will walk you through how to create your WordPress website the right way in five simple steps. But before we start with the first step, there's one important thing that you need to understand. Because if you don't, it will cost you a lot of money and frustration. One of the most common mistakes beginners make is not realizing that there are two versions of WordPress, WordPress.com and WordPress.org. With WordPress.org, You can download the open-source WordPress software for free and install it on any server to create your website. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a for-profit company that offers paid hosting plans for WordPress websites. The issue with WordPress.com is that to unlock full access to all WordPress themes and plugins, you need to be on the business plan, which starts at $25 per month. However, if we choose a different hosting provider, we get full access to the entire WordPress ecosystem for less than $3 per month. And the setup process is just as simple. That's why I don't recommend using WordPress.com to create your WordPress website. You'll end up paying nearly 10 times more compared to the setup that I'm going to walk you through in this video. The first step is to get hosting, which basically means renting a server to store all of our website files. That server runs 24/7, so our website can always be online. There are many hosting providers to choose from. For our website, we'll use Hostinger. It's fast, reliable, easy to set up, and more affordable than most other options. Plus, by using the first link in the video description to sign up, you'll get an additional 10% discount on your hosting plan. To get the best performance, I recommend choosing the business plan. But if you're on a lower budget, the premium plan will also work just fine. Next, choose a payment period and enter your basic information and payment details to register with Hostinger. By the way, Hostinger offers a 30-day money back guarantee. So, if we change our minds in the first 30 days, we can very easily get a full refund. After payment, you'll land at the Hostinger onboarding. To save some time and skip the onboarding sequence, let's click on the Hostinger logo here up at the top and go straight to the Hostinger dashboard. Confirm by clicking leave. And now we're on the Hostinger dashboard. In our to-do items, you can see that we need to verify our email. Let's open our email inbox in a new tab. Find the hostinger email with the subject line verify your email address. Open it and click verify email. That will bring us back to the dashboard. And now we've officially finished getting hosting. Moving to step two of setting up our WordPress website, that is getting our domain. Our domain is simply the name of our website. For Apple, it's apple.com. For Facebook, it's facebook.com. And for your website, it can be anything you like as long as it's still available. In our to-do list, click claim domain. Pick something short, easy to remember, and try to get a domain. I'll go with dan from medics.com. Click check availability. And assuming your domain is available, click claim domain. To register the new domain, we need to choose whether this is a personal site or a site for our company or organization. Then we need to enter our contact details. Then click on finish registration. We see an offer for web hosting, but we already have that. So let's click skip. I don't need a website. And now we need to verify our email address to finish our domain registration. Let's open our email inbox once more and find the email with the subject line important. Verify your contact information. When we open that, find the verification link and click that to verify your email address. If we close this tab and our email inbox, we can refresh our hosting or dashboard. We can see that our domain is now active. And that completes step two of setting up our WordPress website. The third step is to install WordPress. From within the hosting or dashboard, let's click home. Under your to-do list, let's click continue here to continue creating our website. Click create new website because we want to start fresh with our new domain. Then say that we want to build with WordPress. Click next. And here you need to create a password for your WordPress account. This is the account that you will use to manage your website. Click next. And here hostinger will have us choose a website theme. Click choose theme instead. Don't stress about choosing a theme right now or if this page looks slightly different. I will show you how to change this later. So for now, let's just use the default 2025 and click next. Then click do not install plugins. We'll do this later. Now we can select our domain that we want to use for this website and that we've already registered. Click next. Then select the data center closest to your target audience for best website loading performance. Finally, click install WordPress. And now that WordPress has finished installing, click dashboard in the upper left hand menu and that will bring you to the WordPress admin page. We can always get back here to the WordPress admin page by opening a new tab, typing in our domain name, followed up with slash and wpenadmin. Then we can enter our WordPress account details, and we're right back in the dashboard. Let's move on to step four, installing our theme and plugins. First, we'll install a new theme. The theme is like the design template for your website. It controls how your site looks, including colors, fonts, layouts, and styles. To add our theme, let's go to appearance, click on themes, then click on new theme. We're going to install the Astra theme. It's one of the most popular WordPress themes, and the best part is that it's completely free to use. Search for Astra, then click on install and activate. Next, we'll install a plugin called Starter Templates. Plugins are extensions that can be installed on your WordPress website. Each plugin lets you add new features to your WordPress website, similarly like apps on your smartphone. The starter templates plugin will give us access to hundreds of free website templates that will make designing our website easier. In the side menu, click plugins, add new plugin, and search for starter templates. Let's click install now, activate, and once it's in our plugins list, get started. Now, if we go back here, we can click Elementor and ensure that we have that selected as our page builder. If you don't see the option to choose Elementor on your screen, then quickly watch this video right here, which will show you how to fix this. This will bring us to a large library of website templates. Starting with a template will save us time, and your website will end up looking more professional than starting from scratch. But what's the difference between a theme and a template? Well, a theme controls the overall look of the entire website, including colors, fonts, and the layout for all pages. A template, however, only controls the layout of a specific page, such as the homepage, about page, or the contact page. You can browse the templates by category, and you'll see the ones that are paid are marked as premium, but there are plenty of free ones to start with. I'm into travel photography, so I'll choose something like this one. You can start by customizing the site logo, fonts, and colors here on the left. I like the look of these two. I'll click continue, then skip additional features for now. Check that you understand. Submit. And this will build my website. If you visit your domain URL, your website is now live. That completes step four. And now we get to customize our website. In step five, let's start to edit our new website using the Elementor page builder. To start, click edit with Elementor. Every page is structured into one or multiple containers. We have the first container right here at the top. And when we scroll down, we can see all of the other containers of this page. To add a new container, we can just click on the plus icon and then move it to any position on the page. To remove any container, simply click on the X inside. These containers have the elements that make up the content of the page. Let's look at how to edit these elements. To edit that text, just select any text element on your page and then simply change that text. When we go to style and click edit typography, we can edit the style of this text element. And it works the same way for our buttons. We just click on the button that we want to edit and then make changes here on the left side. To change an image, simply click on the image, then select choose image and upload our new image here. In the style tab on the left side, we can make changes to the position and alignment of our image. To make changes to the other pages on our website, we can simply come up here and navigate to another page. And here we can edit elements in the exact same way. To add a completely new page to our website, we first want to open our website in a new tab on our website. Whenever we're logged into our WordPress account, we'll be able to see the menu bar up here at the top. Let's go to new and click on page to add a new page to our website. Then we can name this page and click publish. Now to edit this new page, let's click on edit with Elementor. Here we can start building this page by dragging in content from the left side menu or we can also import a template from the template library. Let's publish our changes and preview our new page. Now to add this new page to our navigation menu, let's click on customize, then go to menus, main menu, and here under add items, we can add our new page to the navigation menu. The last thing that we need to learn is how to edit our website header and footer. To do this, let's click on customize. Then when we hover over the header, we can see these pen icons to edit our header elements. For example, to change our logo, let's click on this pen icon and then change the logo right here. And it works the same way with the website footer. Now you know the basics about how to set up a WordPress website. If you're looking for a more in-depth tutorial on how to design your new website, click on this video right here. Thanks for watching.