Your First Professional Website For Under $100

Websites can be a big investment

Creating a web presence for your business or organization is important. If you want to be found online, you need your own website. However, you don’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles that some websites have. You can start your website in a way that is scalable without spending a ton upfront. This guide will help you start a basic website and get on your way to getting found!

I hope you love the things I recommend! Just so you know, Laurel Leaf Studios may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. I don’t recommend anything I wouldn’t use for myself, and all products or services are things either I use for myself or have personally tested. Enjoy!

What Do I Need?

At the absolute least, a website is comprised of a few pieces.

• Domain Name
• Hosting
• Platform
• Content

I did a piece a while back on the different parts of a website. Feel free to revisit it here.

Start Simple

Get a website host. I always recommend Bluehost. Read more about why they are my go-to for WordPress website hosting here.

They even through in your first year of domain name lease. The first year will set you back under $100. Remember to write down your domain name, username and password!

Is something like Wix, SquareSpace or Weebly a little bit easier for a new business owner? On its surface, yes. It’s a completely standalone product that allows you to drag and drop content slightly more easily than WordPress. However, every addition you want to make to the basic web hosting will cost you about $10 per month every month. On top of that, these platforms are proprietary, which means that you can’t take your website and all of your content with you if you want to use a different web hosting company. If you leave Wix, Weebly or SquareSpace, you will rebuild your entire website from scratch.

This is the main reason I recommend that people start with WordPress. In addition to having very reasonable pricing on basic hosting, the WordPress platform can go anywhere. If you ever want to leave your web host, it’s a simple process to take your website with you.

Install WordPress

Once you walk through the steps to set up your new hosting account, start building right away with their one-click installation of WordPress! Take a tour of the WordPress dashboard in this article. You can easily login to the WordPress Dashboard through your Bluehost account.

Choose a Theme and Add Plugins

My theme is called Activation. It’s 100% responsive right out of the box and allowed me to edit colors, fonts and other aspects to my heart’s content!

Here’s a list of my must-use plugins:

Akismet: Anti-spam plugin (create an account through WordPress.com and sign up for the personal plan. Copy the API Key into your WordPress Dashboard to finish the process).

Defender: Security plugin (no additional account needed; this is a “freemium” version of another plugin, which is very powerful. The free version is absolutely good enough to start).

Smush: Image compressor plugin (go through and adjust these settings before you start uploading photos and content, as this plugin will work in the background once it’s live).

Elementor: Modular page builder plugin (WordPress has introduced a new editor, Gutenberg. While this editor is much more intuitive than the Basic Editor WordPress once came with, Gutenberg still lacks many components that I have come to love in Elementor. When you build a page or post, make sure you click “Edit with Elementor” to have all of the fancy functions you could want).

Forminator: Contact form creator, quiz or poll creator (this is how people can get in touch with you, while also preventing spam. This plugin has the added bonus of polls and Facebook-style quizzes, which will help website visitors stay on your site longer and convert into customers).

Google Analytics: Find out how your marketing plan is working (pair this plugin with a Google Analytics account to use).

Hummingbird: Website Speed Optimizer (this plugin helps your website load as quickly as possible. When paired with Smush, I can get large sites to load extremely fast).

Yoast SEO: SEO helper (fill out the Yoast SEO section on each page and post to help your website get found online).

Social Warfare: Social Media sharing plugin (if you blog, make sure you have social sharing integrated on each post).

Conclusion

From here, it’s a matter of tinkering, editing and adding your content! If you need help, please feel free to contact me!