Namecheap WordPress Tutorial 2026: Step-by-Step Hosting Setup

Hi there, I'm Matt and today I'm going to walk you through creating your WordPress website with NameCheep. In this tutorial, we'll start by setting up your NameCheep hosting account and I'll make sure you know how to get the lowest price available. Then we'll configure your domain name and get WordPress up and running. From there, I'll demonstrate how to access a massive library of professional website templates, all completely free and designed to look great on any device. Finally, I'll teach you how to personalize these templates using Elementor, which is an incredibly userfriendly drag and drop website builder. The best part is almost everything in this guide is completely free. You'll only pay for your NameCheep hosting and a domain. To get the best available deal for NameCheep, go to the link right here at the bottom of the screen, or just scroll down to the video description and click on the first link you find there. When you land on this page, click the orange get limited offer button. This will take you to see the prices. If you choose monthly pricing, you can actually get your first month for free with EasyWP Starter, but you'll generally get a better price overall if you choose yearly pricing. For the absolute cheapest hosting, choose the starter plan. Or if you want an included domain, a CDN, and higher site capacity, then I recommend selecting the Turbo plan. But just know that is not one of the domain extensions that you can get as a free domain with Turbo. To keep things simple for this tutorial, I'll go ahead and select the starter plan. Here you can see everything that's included in the starter plan. And there's a red X next to free domain name, which isn't a big deal because we can add a domain later. If you're happy with the plan you've selected, go ahead and click check out. Next, click the button to log in with NameCheep. If you already have a NameCheep account, you can log in here or click the sign up button at the bottom. Enter your name and email. Create a username and a password. Then click sign up. Then click allow so the EasyWP app can access your namecheep info. Next up, select the payment method. You can use a credit card, a PayPal account, or even click topup funds to pay with Bitcoin. I'll use PayPal. After you make a payment, you'll set up WordPress. Click create a new website and then continue. Next, give your website a name. Then click continue. Here, it'll prompt you to choose a domain. We'll add a custom domain later. For now, keep domain from EasyWP selected and click continue. You'll be prompted to select a theme, but we'll install a custom theme later, so click skip step. You'll also be prompted to choose plugins, and again, you can click skip step. You'll get a review page. Go ahead and click continue. Next, your website will take a few minutes to set up. When it's done, you'll get a success message at the top of the page. Next, let's set up a custom domain for the website. Click the manage button. You'll land on the management dashboard. If you purchased the Turbo plan or higher, you can redeem your free domain by clicking add-ons, scrolling down to integrations, and then clicking redeem offer under NameCheep domain. Or if you chose a plan that doesn't include a domain, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click powered by namecheep. This will open a new tab where you can buy a domain name. Type the domain name you're interested in. In my case, I want to see if Matt's ncwpsite.com is available. Then we'll click search. Good news, that domain is available. When you find a domain you like, go ahead and click add to cart. Then in the bottom right, click checkout. Here you can choose the length of time you want to register your domain for and toggle the box on or off if you want to autorenew once the initial registration period is up. Domain privacy is also toggled on by default and I recommend keeping this because it's free for you and it helps protect your personal information online. Just make sure you don't toggle any boxes to enable web hosting because we've already purchased hosting. When everything looks good, go ahead and click confirm order. Then enter your contact information. And when you're done, click continue. On the next page, you'll confirm your registrant contact, your administrative contact, and technical contact. Unless you need some special adjustments to this, you can just keep the user default account contact. Next, click continue. Then make a payment for your domain using a credit card or PayPal. Again, I'll use PayPal. Go ahead and complete the payment. When the payment finishes processing, you'll get this survey. You can fill it out or just click the X to close it. Now that you've purchased a domain, you can close this tab and return to EasyWP. Then, next to domain, click change. Select your domain on NameCheep. Click the drop down, select your purchase domain, and then click change. Excellent. Now the website is set up with your custom domain and you can preview it by clicking the name of your domain up top. Here you can see the default content that gets created for every new site and you can see that it's linked with our custom domain up top. We'll customize this content in a moment. After you've verified that the site is live at your custom domain, you can close out that tab. Next, let's access our WordPress dashboard to customize our site. Click WP admin. And if you'd like to, you can close the easywp tab. This is your WordPress dashboard. It's like your command center for website management. To start, we'll dismiss this welcome banner. We'll also clean up this dashboard by clicking screen options at the top and then unchecking all these boxes. You can always add back panels that you want to see later. Next, if you get a popup that says there's a new version of WordPress available, you can click to update it now. Then click the update button and then click to update the database. When it's finished, click continue and then it'll take you back to WP Admin. Again, click dashboard. Next, let's deactivate any unnecessary pre-installed plugins. On the left side, click plugins. A WordPress plugin is kind of like a smartphone app. It adds additional functionality to your website. Both of these plugins are pretty cool and conveniently they're already both deactivated. But depending on which plan you choose when you sign up and when you watch this video, you might have different plugins pre-installed. And it's nice to start with a blank slate and add your plugins when you actually need them. So to deactivate all default plugins, click the check box at the top left of the plug-in list. Then click the bulk actions drop down and deactivate. Then click apply. Next, let's install a theme. A WordPress theme controls the overall site structure and appearance. On the left side, click appearance and then at the top, click add theme. You can browse around for a theme that suits you. For this tutorial, we're going to use Astra because I think it has a nice, clean, modern look. In the top right, search for Astra and then it should show up as the first option. Click install and then click activate. When it activates, you'll get this confirmation message and you can click the X to close out of it. Next, let's jump start the design for our website by adding the starter templates plugin. On the left side, navigate back to plugins. Then in the top, click add plugin. Then search for starter plugins. And when you see this one, click install now. Then when it appears, click the activate button. You'll be immediately routed into the onboarding flow for starter templates. Depending on when you watch this video, you may see different things at the beginning of this onboarding flow. In my case, I see an AI website builder. Go up and click the top right drop down and then select Elementor. If you don't see Elementor as an option, let me show you really quickly how to activate it. You'll go to the bottom and click exit to dashboard. Then on the left side, you'll click settings. Scroll to the bottom to the starter template section. Then for the option disable Elementor page builder templates and starter templates, make sure it's unchecked. Then click save changes. Return to plugins and under starter templates, click get started. Again, in the top right, select Elementor from the drop down. After you've selected Elementor for your page builder, you'll see this gallery of templates that are available to you. A template is different than a WordPress theme. A theme is the overall design framework that controls your site's look and feel, while a template is a specific page layout within that theme. You can simply scroll through and look for options. Or you can use the category drop downs at the top to quickly filter and find templates that are suitable for your site. As you scroll through, you'll see that some sites have a premium tag. A premium tag indicates a template that costs money. All the other templates are free. For our tutorial, I really like the look of this one at the top left. So, I'll go ahead and select this. Next, you'll get some initial customization options. First, you can upload a site logo by clicking to upload a file, but if you don't have a logo right now, that's okay. I'll show you how to add one later. You can also choose your font pair, toggling through to see which one you like the best. I like this one. Next, you can choose a color palette. Again, toggling through until you find one that you like. I really like it with this yellow button. Once you've got your initial setup dialed in, go ahead and click continue. You'll be prompted to select features. Check any options that you want or just click skip this step. You'll get this page here and you can fill it out if you'd like to or you can just click I understand. Let's go and then click submit and build my website. This will take a few moments to process as it sets everything up. When it's done, you'll get this fun little confetti animation and you can click view your website to see how it turned out. And here we go. You can see that the starter template is all loaded into our site. Now that we're in our editor, you can close out the starter templates tab. Next, let's start to edit our site. We'll use Elementor for our page builder. To access this, go to the top and click edit with Elementor. And here you can see the Elementor interface. Elementor is a drag and drop builder, making it super easy to make changes to your site. Let's take a quick look at how this web page is constructed. There are two main types of building blocks in WordPress. Containers and elements. These broader sections here are containers. And the individual parts within them are considered elements. To understand the structure of the site better, we can use the structure panel. Click the drop down arrow next to the containers. And if you click the various items in the list, you can see the various containers and elements highlighted so you can understand fully what you're looking at. Containers do exactly what they sound like. They hold other things, including other containers and elements. You can click the I button next to any element in the structure panel to hide and show it. You can also do this for entire sections by clicking the I next to containers. Let's close out of this structure panel by clicking the X. You can always pull it up again later by hitting command I on a Mac or controlI on Windows. If you scroll down to see the next container on the page and hover over it, you'll see that this pink edit container tab appears. You can click these six dots to drag the container to a different location on the page. You can click the plus button to add a new container. Or if you want to remove a container entirely, you can click the X. Next, I'll show you how to edit text, buttons, and images. Elementor makes it super easy to add new elements and make changes. To edit the text on a page, click on the text you want to update and then simply type like you're in a word processor. You can also update text styles by clicking the style tab in the left side inspector panel. To update buttons, it's similar. Click on the button you want to change and then in the left side panel, change the text. You can link the button to a destination in the link section on the left side panel. First, delete the pound sign. Then start typing the name of the page you want to connect and select it when it shows up. The link will fill in automatically. For external links, just paste the full URL. And like text, you can update button styles by clicking the style tab. It's also really easy to add new elements to a page. Go up to the top and click plus to add an element. Then find the element type you want to add and drag it in. To move the element to a different spot on the page, simply click on it and drag it elsewhere. To remove an element, simply secondary click on it and then click delete. Next, I'll show you how to update the images. Click on any image you want to change and then in the left side panel, hover over the image and select choose image. Then click select files to upload an image from your computer or click media library to find one that's already on your site. You can also click search images to find stock images. When you find one you like, click insert. Now you know how to edit containers and elements on your page. But what if you want to add a new page? Elementor makes this super easy. Simply go up to the top and click the drop down next to your current page name. In our case, that's home. Then click add new page. You may get a window asking you to save before you leave. Go ahead and click save and leave. Here you can see the blank page. First, we'll want to name it. So, go up and click the gear icon. And then in the left side under general settings, find the title field and give your page a name. In my case, I'll call it the team. Next, you could click the plus button to add a container. Select a layout for the container and start adding elements. This is great if you want to build a page from scratch. But if you don't want to build everything from scratch, you can use starter templates to give you a jump start. Click the starter templates logo. Scroll through the gallery to find a general design you like. And when you open it up, you'll get options for individual pages. In my case, I like this about us design here. So, I'll go ahead and click to open it and then click import template. And just like that, the template has been loaded onto the page. And I can quickly change this header to say the team. Now, if someone were to go to this website right now, they would not see this page. And that's because if you look at the top next to the page name, it says draft. To make this page live, click publish in the top right. And here you can see the draft tag next to our page name has disappeared. And the page is currently live. To preview this page on your live site, you can go up to the top right and click the eye icon. And there it is. But there's just one problem. This page doesn't show up in our navigation bar. To add this new page to the navigation bar, go up to the top left and click customize. Then on the left side, click menus and then click main menu. Here you can click add items and then select the new page from the list and click publish to see your changes. If you don't like the order of the items in the menu, you can simply grab the new page and drag it to a new location. Again, when you're happy with your changes, you can click publish and then you can back out to the main menu. Now, while we're in here, let me show you how to update the site's header and footer. We'll start with the header on the left side. From the menu, click header. And next, we can update the site logo. To change the logo, click the change logo button and then add your new logo from the media library or upload a new file. Just like that, the logo's been added to the top left of the website. And I can change the logo size by changing the logo width with this slider here. Next, let's update the site footer. We'll back out to that main menu and then select footer. And here you can make updates by dragging the various elements in this editor down below. When you're done, be sure to publish your changes. When you're done making changes to the site settings, click the X to back out. And here we can see our beautiful new website. Now you know how to set up your WordPress website with NameCheep, and you know how to customize it using Elementor's intuitive tools. Remember, if you haven't signed up yet, use our special partner link in the description to get the best deal on NameCheep hosting. Thanks for following along.