Setup YOUR website now, FAST and FREE

So you want to set up a website, but you don’t know where to start. You don’t know how to code, and everything you research leaves you feeling more confused at exactly how to set up a website, much less how to do it whatever the cheap way is, and get it done quickly.

That ends now. Not only will I get you set up with a website quickly and free. We’ll be able to set up almost anything you want from an e-commerce site to a Youtube clone, and you won’t need to code one bit after to build and maintain your site.

It may sound too good to be true. I get why you’d say that if you look at the plans for site builders like Wix or Squarespace

As a veteran web developer who has been hosting complicated web apps for decades now, and has set up several of them for free, I scoff at such prices.

You’ve probably heard shit like this advertised on some influencer’s vlog before. But remember, every ad-roll on Youtube is advertising some pricey, and sometimes scammy, bullshit. Skip the big guys and listen to my advice.

Now let’s say you had one of the most common use cases for setting up a website:

• A landing page for your business, service, event, or location
• A blog
• An E-commerce website to sell products and/or services

Lucky for you, the easiest, fastest, and most convenient way to set a website up capable of doing these things is the one piece of software, a web app you can install known as WordPress. To give you an idea of just how powerful WordPress is: As of writing this, over 40% of the websites on the internet run on WordPress, making it essentially the standard.

So let’s go from zero to WordPress in record time.

You’re going to want to ‘host’ your website. It’s just terminology meaning your site is put on some server which is up 24/7 to handle traffic that comes to it. You could technically do this yourself, and there are some good reasons to, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really know what you’re doing.

As you might expect, hosting costs money. There are internet and hardware costs associated with running your website. But as long as I’ve been on the internet, there have been web hosts willing to host your site for free. Usually as a free introductory service to funnel you to more expensive options.

Here is a free host I found to be quite good on which to set up WordPress and do it quickly: Infinity Free.

Ok. So here’s the game plan:

Register

Get signed up and go through the registration process, using your email address and password. And then verify your email.

A word to the wise, I had to disable my ad-block in order to verify my email. Just so you know.

Create an Account

You’ll see the following screen. Create an account and choose the free plan

Create your free domain

This is your web address. It’s a sub domain, which means other than being something.com, you’ll have something.else.com. Which isn’t a major deal.

If this is a deal breaker for you, don’t sweat it, this site does allow you to host your whatever.com domain name through them, but it’s a topic for another time, and no matter what, that’s a service you’ll have to pay for through a 3rd party. So for the ease of getting set up, let’s just go with the subdomain for now.

Mine will be http://dude.rf.gd which was surprisingly available. It’s a good short domain name that more or less circumvents the need to buy one. What’s an extra dot in your address at the end of the day?

The next screen will provide you with a usernames and password, make sure you save these somewhere.

Once you are done you can go into your control panel and we can get started on setting up our WordPress. Instead of clicking the big green control panel button, click finish.

Setting up your WordPress

Now what you’re going to want to do is set up WordPress using the “Softaculous” installer. Softaculous is a great web app which installs other common web apps for you. This could also be done manually, by uploading the WordPress files, setting up a database and running and configuring WordPress, but Softaculous takes care of all of that for you.

Back in my day Softaculous used to be something you’d pay a webhost for, but I’m impressed to see that Infinity provides it for free. Click “Softaculous Installer” and we’ll move to the next steps.

Here, you’ll see the Softaculous installer, and the very top script will be WordPress. All you have to do is click on the install button and give it a few details.

Now, I’d like to direct your attention to the left. You’ll see there are numerous useful applications you can install, everything from e-commerce to social media. All with minimal configuration.

After you click Install you’ll be taken to a configuration screen for WordPress. Here you can choose the name and description of your site and what directory it’s installed to. I use my home directory by leaving the “in directory” field blank. If you’re not sure what to do, you should do that as well.

You can also select a theme. And the themes they show here are actually just the tip of the iceberg. Once you have WordPress installed there are thousands of more free WordPress themes to choose from. The themes are made for e-commerce sites, product/service landing pages, news, and blogs, allowing you several options.

I choose this one, then clicked “Install”

Softaculous will start to install WordPress.

Now, I don’t know why this is, but whenever I install WordPress on Infinity Free with Softaculous, it says I’ve lost connection a few percent in and I have to click ok, then it also hangs at 95% despite completing the installation.

If that happens to you. refresh, click installations, and you will see your WordPress has actually finished:

And here’s what my site looks like now:

Now you’ll probably want to start adding your own pages and posts. So to do so you’ll want to navigate to http://yourdomain.whatever.com/wp-admin

Once you do you should see a login screen like that below:

You’ll see all of the posts and pages on the site, and there are several tools and plugins you can use to add and edit all of the pages on the site:

Creating an SSL certificate

One final thing is you should create an SSL certificate so people can access the https:// version of your website and don’t receive warnings when trying to access the non-https version. But that is an article for another day. But it also only takes a few clicks on Infinity Free.

The Benefits of WordPress

There are numerable benefits to running WordPress:

• Ease of installation – You just saw how fast it was to get a WordPress up and running.
• Ease of management – You don’t need to know any HTML, CSS, Javascript or PHP to get WordPress running or customized, it works out of the box and is built to need as little code skill as possible.
• Search engine optimized by default – WordPress is built to already have a sitemap.xml file needed for search engines, and is easy to find by search engine crawlers. Even without submitting your site to search engines directly, it’s common for it to start appearing in search engines (and, unfortunately, to malicious bots like spam commenters) only days after its creation.
• Large ecosystem of themes and plugins – There are thousands of free themes to choose from and configure. There are plug-ins to help you optimize your content for search engines, to monitor analytics on your site, or help you automatically post to social media. There are plug-ins that add features, and a huge list of free and premium tools alike.

I hope this gets you started on your WordPress journey, or to experiment with the hundreds of other PHP software packages you can install with a few clicks. You don’t need to hire a team of web developers, or a designer, or even pay one of the big guys for a site builder. And if you do, it never hurts to see if you can do it yourself first, and just how far you can get. You just might be surprised.

That’s the basics at its core. It’s possible to have something like this done in 5-10 minutes. So why wait. Get started now.