WordPress Tutorial for Beginners (2026)

Hey there, my name is Simon and in this WordPress tutorial for beginners, I'm going to show you how to create a WordPress website in the easiest and most affordable way possible. This video is designed for complete beginners. We'll go through the entire process step by step. So, even if you've never built a website before, you'll be able to easily follow along and have your own WordPress website up and running by the end of this video. And don't worry, we won't be needing to write any code to set up our website. Instead, we'll use a visual drag and drop page builder called Elementor, which is the most popular way to build and design WordPress websites. To keep our costs as low as possible, we'll be using a free theme and only free plugins to build the entire site. This means that the only thing we have to pay for is website hosting. And I'm going to show you how to get the best WordPress hosting for just a few dollars per month. I'll also show you how to get access to hundreds of professionally designed website templates that are fully customizable and mobile friendly. With that being said, let's get started right away. Now, before we get started setting up our WordPress website in the right way, there's one very important thing you have to understand, which is that there's actually two versions of WordPress. When I type in WordPress here in Google, there's WordPress.com and then further down there's WordPress.org. So, what is the difference? And which one should we use to build our website on? Well, when I go to WordPress.org or right here. This is actually where you can download the free open-source software WordPress that we want to use to build our website. We can just scroll down, click on discover WordPress, then click on get WordPress, and then right here we can download the latest version of WordPress, install it on a server, and then create our website. So, what is WordPress.com? WordPress.com is basically a paid service offering hosting for WordPress websites. So, when we go to plans and pricing, we can see that they have different hosting plans. And I've tested these plans. And one thing that I've noticed is that in order for you to get access to the full WordPress ecosystem, meaning all of the plugins or themes you might want to use, you're going to have to upgrade to at least the business plan, which is $25 per month if you pay annually or $40 per month if you pay monthly. And here's the problem with WordPress.com. There are much more affordable options for hosting your WordPress website without any limits when it comes to access to themes and plugins. A mistake many beginners make is that they just go to Google, type in WordPress, go with the first option, and get hosting through WordPress.com, and then are frustrated when they realize how much they have to pay just to get access to all of the themes and plugins they might want to use. So, in this video, we're going to use a different hosting provider that is perfect for WordPress websites and doesn't have any limits. Now, if you don't know what hosting means, it's basically just renting space on a server where all of your website files will be stored. That server runs 24/7 so that people can visit your website at any time. All right, so we're going to set up our WordPress website in five simple steps. First, we're going to get hosting, which is again just renting space on a server. And this is going to be the only cost we will have with building and running our website. Then we're going to get our domain, which is the name of your website. So something like medixed media.com or yourname.com, whatever you want. Then we're going to install WordPress, meaning the free open-source software from WordPress.org. Then we're going to install a free theme and free plugins which allow us to build our website and design it however we want. And then fifth, we're going to learn how to customize our website and make changes to it. So, let's get started with the first step, which is getting hosting. Now, when we go back to WordPress.org and then click on see all recommended hosts, we can see a list of three different hosting companies that WordPress officially recommends for running a WordPress website. There is Pressible, there's Blue Host, and then there is Hostinger. I've used all of them, and the one that I recommend is Hostinger. It's definitely the easiest one to use. It's very affordable and I've been personally using it for multiple years and also recommending it for multiple years without any issues. So, this is the one that we're going to use in this video. Now, I was able to partner with Hostinger for this video and they gave me an exclusive discount link that you can use to sign up for any of their hosting plans and get an additional 10% discount on any plan that you choose. Now, to claim that discount, all you have to do is scroll down and click on the first link you find in the video description. This link will take you to the signup page that looks like this, where you can see that the discount code MedX Media has been applied. Now, once you're on this page, simply click on start now, and this will scroll you down to the different hosting plans. Here, I recommend to either go with the business or the premium plan. The business plan will give you more performance in terms of website loading speed and it'll also allow you to create up to 50 websites and give you 50 GB of storage. Now, this is the plan that I personally use and recommend, but if you're on a limited budget, you can also take the premium plan and you should be just fine. I'm going to go ahead and choose the business plan. And here on the next step, we're going to have to choose our payment cycle, which is currently set to 48 months. This will give us an introductory rate of $269 per month for hosting our WordPress website for 4 years. After the four years, it will renew at $16.99 per month. So, this is the most affordable option that you can choose if you don't mind to pay a bit more upfront. If you don't want to pay as much upfront, you can also choose the 24 or 12 months option, which will increase the average price a little bit, but you don't have to pay as much upfront. I don't recommend to go with the one month option because it is considerably more expensive. I'm going to go ahead and choose the 48 months option. And then before we click on continue, make sure the coupon code Medix Media is applied. And once you've confirmed that, let's click on continue. On the next step, enter your email and choose a password and click register. Then enter your billing address and click continue. And finally, enter your payment information and click submit payment. And this will take us to the onboarding steps for Hostinger. Now, because these steps change often, it's going to be easier for you to follow along if we go straight to the Hostinger dashboard and set up everything there. So, for now, we're going to skip these steps and click on this Hostinger logo up here and then confirm by clicking on leave. [snorts] And this will take us into our Hostinger dashboard. Here the first thing we want to do is confirm the email address that we have used to sign up for Hostinger. So go to your email inbox and look for an email from Hostinger. Open it and then click on verify email. And this will confirm your email and take you back into the Hostinger dashboard. So now we're done with the first step which was getting our hosting and we can move on to the next step which is getting our domain. Now if you already have registered your domain somewhere else then I'm going to leave a link down below in the description to a video explaining how to connect your domain to your hosting or account. For now you can just skip ahead to the next step installing WordPress and connect your domain name at the end once your website is up and running. So to set up our domain, we're going to start here in the WordPress dashboard and then go to domains and then here under claim your free domain. Let's click on claim domain. Here the first thing we want to do is choose our domain extension. Generally I recommend to go with a.com domain if you can. It's just what most people are used to. So you can't really go wrong with that. However, if you want to choose a different domain extension, you can do that as well. Then enter your desired website name in this field and click on check availability. And then it will tell you if your domain is still available. If it is, make sure that's the actual domain you want to use for your website. And if that's confirmed, you can go ahead and click on claim domain. Now, to finish the registration for our new domain, we're going to have to enter our contact details. If you're setting up a personal website, then stick to personal. If it's going to be a company or organization website, you can switch this here and click on next step. Then, simply enter the contact details and click on finish registration here. Let's click on continue. And this will take us back to the hostinger dashboard. Now there's one more step to complete domain registration which is that we have to confirm our email address once again. So let's go to our email inbox and look for an email saying verify your email address to use your domain. Let's open the email and then click on verify email and click on continue to home. And now we're back in the hosting or dashboard where we can see our new domain right here. Great. So now that we have our domain, we are done with the second step and we can move on to the third step which is installing WordPress. So what we're going to do is basically install the WordPress software which we can download here on WordPress.org on our Hostinger server. However, we don't actually have to download the software right here because Hostinger will do all that for us. So let's go ahead and go back to the Hostinger dashboard. And here let's click on websites. And then here let's click on continue setup. Here I'm going to choose that I want to build a website for myself or my business and click on next. Then let's choose create a website and click next. Here because we want to build a WordPress website, let's choose WordPress and click next. Next, we're going to have to set up our login details for our WordPress account. For WordPress admin mail, I'm going to use the same email as I've used for Hostinger. And then for administrator password, I'm going to enter a new password. Then let's click on next. Here, we don't want to use any of these two options. So, let's continue by clicking on create blank site at the bottom. Here, we have to choose a domain name that we want to use for this WordPress website. And if you've been following along and have set up your domain here on Hostinger, you should be able to choose it right here. If you don't already have your domain name or you have it somewhere else, don't worry. You can just click on use temporary domain for now and connect it later. I'm going to use my domain that I've set up before and click on next. Here we have the ability to choose our server location, which is going to be the location where all of your website files will be stored. Generally, you want to pick a location that is closest to most of your website visitors. So, if most of your website visitors are going to be coming from the United States, then you want to choose a server location in the United States. If most of them are going to come from Europe, then you want to choose a location here in Europe. So, pick the most optimal location for you and then click on next. And now WordPress is being installed. And once the installation is complete, it will automatically take you to your WordPress dashboard, which is basically the back end of your new website. Now, I'm going to show you two easy ways to reach this dashboard in the future. The first one is to simply go to your hosting or account, go to websites, and then right here, you can find your website and click on WP Admin, which will take you to your dashboard. An even faster way is to simply open up a new tab in your browser, type in your website domain followed by wp-enadmin, and then hit enter. And that will also take you directly to your WordPress dashboard. So now we're done with the third step, which was installing WordPress. And we're going to move on to the next step, which is installing our theme and the plugins that we need to build our website. So, back here in the WordPress dashboard, let's start by installing our theme. Let's head over to appearance here on the left side. And then right here, we can see the currently active theme is the 2025 theme, which is quite limited. So, we're going to replace it with a better one. So, let's click on add theme here at the top. The theme we're going to install is one of the most popular free themes for WordPress and it allows us to build pretty much any kind of website. It's called Astra and you can already see it right here. If you can't see it, just go to the search bar, type in Astra, and then it should come up right here. So once you see it, simply click on install and then activate. And this takes us back to our themes where we can now see that Astra is now activated for our website. So this theme basically gives our website the basic structure and allows us to design our website using a visual drag and drop page builder. So we don't have to write any code to build our website. Next, let's head over to our plugins here on the left side and close this window right here. So you can essentially think of plugins as being very similar to apps for your smartphone. You can just install new plugins and add them to your website. And these plugins will give your website additional features. Now because we have installed WordPress on Hostinger, you can already see a few Hostinger plugins coming pre-installed. Now before we move on, we're actually going to deactivate these plugins and delete them from our website because we don't really need them. And it's always good to delete plugins that you don't need. Plugins that you don't need might just slow down your website, which isn't a good thing. And one thing that I've noticed is that we might run into some troubles choosing the right page builder that we want if we don't delete these plugins. So, make sure you follow along here. So, let's first select all of the Hostinger plugins. Then go to bulk actions and deactivate. Then click apply. and then select them once again. Go to bulk actions, click delete, and apply. Confirm. Great. So now these four plugins have been deleted. And we're actually going to keep the light speeded cache plugin because this one increases our website performance. Next, we're actually going to install a new plugin called starter templates. And this plug-in will give us access to hundreds of professionally designed website templates that will make building our website 100 times easier. So, let's come over here and click on add plugin. Then go to the search bar and type in starter templates. Then look for this one right here and click on install now and activate. Once that plugin is activated, it might already take you into this onboarding sequence. But before we go through here, let's quickly exit back to the dashboard by clicking on exit to dashboard right here. Then let's go to settings and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. And right here where it says starter templates, make sure this option here is unchecked because if you have it checked, then you won't be able to select the right page builder that we want to use. So once you made sure this is unchecked, let's click on save changes and then go back to our plugins. And then here we can see that plug-in we have just installed, starter templates. And to get back to that onboarding screen, let's just click on get started. And here, before we choose anything, we want to make sure to go up to the right and switch from the AI website builder to Elementor. Elementor is the most popular visual page builder for WordPress. And this is the one that we want to use to build our website with. So, let's choose that here. And this takes us into a large library of website templates that we can start our website with. Now, I recommend to everyone to start your website with a pre-esigned template because, especially if you're not a web designer, the end result will most likely look a lot better and a lot more professional compared to if you try to design everything yourself from scratch. Now, the easiest way to find the right template as a starting point for your website is to either just browse these categories right here and then just check them out based on what you're looking for. Or you can also type in the kind of website you want to build right here. So, for example, if I want to build a restaurant website, I can just type that in here at the top and then I get different types of templates I can start a restaurant website with. Now, some of these templates are marked as premium, which means they are not free. But you also get a lot of free options. For example, this one here, this one here, or this one right here. Now, for this video, I'm going to build a portfolio website. So, I'm going to just type in portfolio right here, and see what kind of templates come up. So, for my demo website, I'm just going to go ahead and use this template right here for a personal portfolio. And here we can already make some changes to our website like we can upload a logo. We can try out different font styles and we can play around with different color palettes for our website. So I'm going to choose this font style here and this color palette and then click on continue. Then here on this next step, we currently don't need any of these additional features. So let's just click on skip this step here at the bottom. And finally, let's click on skip and start building. And now our website is being built and all of the necessary plugins that we need for this website are being installed. Once that's done, let's click on view your website. And there we go. Now our website has been set up based on our template that we have chosen before. So this right here is our homepage. We can also navigate to other pages by just using our navigation menu here at the top. And our website is also already connected to our domain. So when we go to a new tab and type in our domain at the top, hit enter. Then we get to our website. And that was it for the fourth step, which was installing our theme, plugins, and choosing a template. And now we're going to move on to the final step, which is learning how to customize our website. So to customize our website, we're going to use the Elementor page builder. And to get to that page builder, we either start right here on our website by typing in our domain here at the top. And then whenever we're logged in to our WordPress admin account, we should be able to see this menu bar here at the top. And right here, you can see a button that says edit with Elementor. So let's click on that. And this will open up the Elementor page builder where we can now customize our website. Another easy way to get to our page builder for every page on our website is to simply go through the WordPress dashboard. So once we're here, simply go to pages here on the left side and then right here we can see a few pages that have been set up for us based on that template that we have chosen. And then for any page that you want to edit, simply hover over that page and then right here you can see a link saying edit with Elementor. Simply click on that link and then that page will be opened up in the Elementor page builder. Now to edit any text on your website, all you have to do is click on the text element that you want to change and then on the left side the options for this text element will open up. So, we can either just change the text right here or just click into this field in the preview and then just type in whatever you want to change it to. Now, if you also want to change the style of this text, we can just head over to the style tab right here and then we can make some changes. For example, under typography, we can change the size of this text or we can change the line height right here and just make it look exactly what we want it to be. And it works the same way for other elements on your website. Like for example, this button down here. We can simply select it and then on the left side menu, we can change the text. We can also define where this button links to. So, if I want to link it to the contact page, I'll just type in contact in here and then choose my contact page. Now, to change images, simply click on the image element you want to change. Then go to choose image right here and upload the image you want to use and click on select. Now, if you want to add a new element to your website, we can also do that by going to the plus up here and then on the left side, you can find all the different elements you can add. So, for example, if you want to add another text element to the top of this heading, we can just drag and drop that text editor to the top of this heading. And to change the text, we'll do that the same way as we've done before. Just click into the element and highlight the text and then change it to whatever you want. To delete anything on your page, simply rightclick on the element and click on delete. Now, we've spent some time customizing the top section of our homepage. And when we scroll down, we can find more sections, and we can customize these in the exact same way. Now, if you want to delete a specific section on your page, you can do that as well by just hovering over the section you want to delete and then by clicking on the X right here. And to make these changes visible on our live website, we're going to have to come up here and click on publish. And of course, we can also customize the other pages on our store by switching from the homepage right here to, for example, the about page. And then right here, we can customize everything in the exact same way. Now, whenever we want to add a completely new page to our website, we can do that by coming up here to the navigation again and then choosing add new page. And then to name our page, let's head over to the page settings right here at the top. And then change the name here under title. And then we can start building out this new page we have just added. Once it's done, we can publish it by clicking on publish here at the top. Now, to add our new page to the navigation menu here at the top, we want to go to our website by opening up a new tab and then typing in our website URL and then hit enter. And then once here, we want to click on customize here at the top. Here we want to go to menus, click on main menu, then click add items, and then choose the team page we have just created before. Click on publish. And now we can see that new team page in the navigation menu up here. So let's close out of this for now. And then finally, let's take a look at how to customize the header and the footer area of your website because that's actually something that we cannot use Elementor to customize. So to do that, go to your website first and then once again click on customize up here. Once you do that, you can just hover over your header area and then for anything that you want to change, you can see these pen icons right here. So, for example, if you want to change the logo, we can just click on the pen icon next to it and then we can change the logo right here. And it works exactly the same way for the footer of our website. So, when we scroll all the way down and then hover over any elements here on the footer, we can just click on anything that we want to change and then right here on the left side, we can make changes. Now, if you've made it all the way to this point in the video and you now feel ready to set up your own WordPress website, don't forget to use the first link in the description below to save an additional 10% on your WordPress hosting. And if you're looking for a more in-depth guide on how to customize your website using Elementor, click on this video next where I'll show you how to customize every part of your new WordPress website step by step. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.