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

Hi there, I'm Matt and today I'm going to walk you through creating your WordPress website with Cloudways. In this tutorial, we'll start by setting up your Cloudways 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 website templates using Elementor, which is an incredibly user-friendly drag and drop website builder. WordPress, Elementor, and the website templates are all completely free. You'll only pay for your domain and Cloudways hosting, which comes with a 3-day free trial. To save even more, use the link below or scroll down and click the first link in the video description to get 25% off your first 3 months on any plan. That link takes you straight to the signup page with the discount already applied. The best part is no credit card is required upfront and you'll get a 3-day free trial to try things out before paying anything. Add your name, email, and create a password. Then fill out the questionnaire fields. Check the agreement box, then click the sign up button. Next, open your inbox, find the verification email, and click the button. Enter your phone number, then click send SMS. Enter the six-digit verification code, then click verify. On the next page, click 3-day free trial. You'll be routed straight to the application and server configuration page. Now, unlike traditional shared hosting where you're renting space on a server shared with other people, with Cloudways, you're configuring your own virtual private server. You set up the exact server parameters you need on whichever cloud service provider you want from the list, and you can install unlimited websites on it, scaling to more capacity when your site needs it. Optimized WordPress should already be selected from the list, but you can configure a different WordPress setup if you'd like to. Next, name your application, server, and project. Choose your application stack. I recommend sticking with the default hybrid stack. Next, select your server. You can use Digital Ocean, Vulture, or Lode on the free trial. AWS and Google Cloud require upgrading to a paid plan to use them. For the absolute cheapest option, choose Digital Ocean. Depending on which cloud server provider you choose, you'll get different settings. But if you're following along for the cheapest option, I recommend starting with basic for the server type and choosing 1 or 2 GB to get started. You can easily scale up to more capacity when you need it later. Choose a server location nearest to your intended audience to give them the best speeds. Click launch now when you're done configuring. You may be presented with some optional plugins, but you can click skip for now and install the plugins you want later. Now, this will take a few minutes as Cloudways sets up your server. I'll fast forward to when it's completed. When it's done, let's check out your live WordPress website. Click the www icon on the server, then click WordPress. This will open your WordPress access details page. Click the application URL link to view your live site. It's very basic, but it's live on the internet. We'll customize it later. It also has an ugly temporary cloudwaysapps.com domain. Let's set up the site with a custom domain. If you close out of the live site tab and go to the domain management window within your WordPress management page, you'll see the domain list with the temporary domain and a button to add a domain. Cloudways does not offer domain registar services. So, you'll need to bring your own domain. If you don't have a domain already, I recommend namecheep for super cheap domains. If you already have a domain, stick around. I'll show you how to configure the DNS records to point your domain to your new site. I'm doing this in NameCheep, but it should work similarly with any major registar. Use our link in the description or on the screen to get the best available deal with NameCheep. You'll land on a page where you can search for a domain. Search for the domain you want. In my case, I want to see if mattwpsite.com is available. When you find a suitable domain, click add to cart, then check out. Next, you'll be given purchase options. You can select your domain registration period. The default is 1 year. If you don't want to forget to renew it next year, you can toggle on autorenew. You'll also have domain privacy toggled on by default. It's free and keeps your personal information more secure, so I recommend keeping this enabled. Then, there are a ton of additional options. I don't really recommend any of these, but feel free to add anything that seems useful for your site, like a custom business email, for example. Just don't purchase web hosting. You already have this. You also don't need to buy SSL. We'll add this for free in just a bit. Click confirm order when you're all finished. Create an account or login with your credentials if you already have a NameCheep account. On the next page, enter your payment information. You can use a card or PayPal. Then click continue. Then finalize your payment. When it finishes processing and you get a purchase confirmation, scroll down and click manage next to domain registration. On the page that loads, click advanced DNS. Delete the default records. Back in Cloudways, open all servers by clicking the server icon in the top left. Then select your server. This will open the master credentials page for your server. Copy your public IP. Return to the namecheep tab. Click add new record and select a record. For host, enter the at@ symbol. For value, paste in your IP. Keep TTL as automatic and click the check mark to save changes. Add another record. Select CNAME. For host, enter www. For value, type your domain name without any prefixes. Keep TTL as automatic and save changes. Return to Cloudways. Click the www globe icon to access applications installed on this server. Select WordPress. Navigate to domain management. Click add domain. Type your root domain in and click save changes. It may take a moment to process, but you'll get a confirmation message when it's complete. Click the kebab menu. That's the three dots next to your domain. Then click make primary from the pop-up menu. Click set as primary in the confirmation popup. Again, this may take a moment to process. You'll get a confirmation popup when it's complete. Now, if you try to go to your website, your browser will probably try to default to sending you to an HTTPS version of your address, but you'll likely get a warning from your browser about the site's security. The problem is we haven't set up an SSL certificate yet. So, let's do that next. In Cloudways, navigate to SSL certificate. We'll get a let's encrypt certificate. Enter your email address. Then enter your root domain name. Click install certificate. This will take a few moments to process. Then you'll get a confirmation popup saying the SSL certificate was installed. Now, if you go up to the top where it says WordPress and click the arrow inside the box to visit your site, you should be routed to your live WordPress site and you should see the correct new custom domain displayed. If you still don't have access to your website at your custom domain, just be patient. DNS updates can take a while to propagate. In some cases, up to 48 hours, though, it's usually much quicker. You can check out the status of your domain propagation at what's mydns.net. I've left a link to this in the description below. If your custom domain still isn't working after 48 hours, I recommend checking out the Cloudways help documentation. Again, I've left a link to the relevant documentation in the description below. Now that your server is set up and your website is configured with a custom domain, let's get access to WordPress to start building your website. Close your extra tabs and return to Cloudways. Navigate to the access details section of your WordPress application management page. Going forward, you can access your website by going to your domain followed by /wp-admin. You'll use the username and password provided by Cloudways. Copy the password from the admin panel section. Then click on the link to your admin panel or type it in your browser. A WordPress login screen will appear. Enter your email and paste in your password. Then click login. I recommend saving these credentials in a password manager. When it loads, you'll be taken to your WordPress admin panel dashboard. Welcome to WordPress. 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, let's deactivate and delete 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 like an app does with your phone. Depending on 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. 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 select deactivate, then click apply. Now, with all the plugins deactivated, click the check box at the top left again. Then click the bulk actions dropown and select delete. Then click apply. Confirm the deletion when prompted. 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. But 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 at the top, click add plugin. Then search for starter templates. 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 dropdown and then select Elementor. Now, if Elementor doesn't show up in the drop down at the top right, let me show you really quickly how to enable 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 templates 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 the 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 Cloudways 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 a 3-day free trial and 25% off your first three months of Cloudways hosting. Thanks for following along.