In this article I will show you a step-by-step guide on how to start a blog with NameCheap.
If you are a starter blogger and planning to start your own blog. Then you might want to consider the NameCheap shared hosting.
The best thing about NameCheap is that their lowest shared hosting plan named Stellar only costs $2.88/mo and their .com domain only cost $8.88/year which is really cheap.
They also currently offer a .website extension for free if you purchase a Stellar shared hosting pan so you can literally start your own blog right now with just a $2.88 budget.
This means that if you are a starter blogger then you can start with a really low budget. And just upgrade if necessary once your website started to gain traction and more visitors.
Here is the step-by-step guide on how to start a blog with NameCheap.
On the next page, you will be given a choice whether you want to:
Claim your free .website domain
Purchase a new domain
Use a current domain you own in NameCheap
Use a domain from another registrar
In this example we will purchase a new domain. If you do the same your cart should look something like this.
Just click Continue and proceed to purchase the Stellar plan and your new domain.
2. Login to Your cPanel
Once you purchase the Stellar plan and your new domain. You will receive an email containing your server host login credentials.
The important details on these are the cPanel username and cPanel password.
Once you take note of your cPanel username and cPanel password. You will need to go to your cPanel login page.
Your cPanel login page will look like something this:
http://howtostartablogwithnamecheap.com/cpanel/
Basically it is your domain name followed by /cpanel at the end.
Go to your cPanel login page and login using the cPanel username and cPanel password you received in your email.
3. Install WordPress
Once you are inside the cPanel, go to the bottom of the page and you will see the Softaculous Apps Installer section and under it is the WordPress icon.
Click on the WordPress icon to start the installation of WordPress.
On the next page you will see something like this:
Just click on the Install Now button to proceed to the next page.
On the next page, you will be able to:
Choose which domain you want to install WordPress
Add your Site Name
Add your Site Description
Set your WordPress Admin Username
Set your WordPress Admin Password
Add your Admin Email
Choose Language for your Blog
Install plugins like Loginizer, W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache
Select your WordPress Theme
Once you setup everything above you will just need to click the Install button at the very bottom of the page.
After you click Install, it will show you a loading bar saying it will take 3 to 4 minutes to finish the installation. But the reality is it will only take a few seconds.
After the installation is finish you will see this page:
In this page you can see your domain which now has WordPress installed. So if you click on it you will see the front page of your website.
The link below it is your WordPress admin login page. If you click on it you will be redirected to your WordPress login page and you can use your WordPress admin username and admin password to login.
These are the credentials you setup in the previous step.
Conclusion
That is your step-by-step guide on how to start a blog with NameCheap.
It is very easy to do and very cheap as well.
As for performance, I am able to attain 100/100 in Google PageSpeed after I fully optimized my website.
This is pretty outstanding considering it is a shared hosting.
The only issue is that sometimes the server response time drops to more than 300ms so when this happens the Google PageSpeed score also drops but still remain in the 90s.
All in all the Stellar plan is very good for a starter blogger and it will not hurt your pocket.
After you installed your WordPress blog you might want to consider installing my recommended plugins.
In this article, I will provide you a list of the the essential WordPress plugins you must install as soon as you get your WordPress website.
Finding the essential WordPress plugins can be a tough job for a beginner blogger.
Especially when you still don’t know what you are looking for.
To put it into a perspective there is currently over 56,000+ plugins in the WordPress repository. And ideally you should only have less than 30 plugins to avoid frequently breaking functionality.
Basically if you run into an issue with your website. The less the plugins are, the easier it is to troubleshoot which one is causing the issue.
The good thing is this doesn’t happen often in WordPress anymore. As WordPress mildly enforces the plugin developers to use a unique naming scheme on their plugins.
So duplicate function error rarely happens now. The issue now mostly is on the JS side of things.
For this article, I am going to list the plugins that I am using. And add some that you may also need.
Here are the essential WordPress plugins in 2018.
1. Akismet Anti-Spam
Security Plugin – Used by Good Tech Guru
This plugin already comes pre-installed with WordPress. You will just need to signup at the Akismet website to get an API key to activate the plugin.
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin which checks your comment and contact form submissions.
If it deemed the comment or contact form submission as a spam then it will automatically block it.
You can always check the spam messages it blocked on the comment section.
Yoast SEO is a truly essential WordPress plugin! There are so many features in this plugin now that will make you fall in love with it.
Firstly, when creating an article, it has a feature called Readability Analysis.
Basically what it does is check your grammar and writing style then give you suggestions on how to improve them.
It will also highlight which sections it is pertaining to so you will not have to guess which sections to improve.
Secondly, for article as well, is the Focus Keyword feature.
Just type your focus keyword on it and it will show you suggestions on how to improve its visibility on the search engines.
If you do the suggestions. The Readability Analysis and Focus Keyword will turn to a green smiley. And I gotta tell you it has become pretty addicting for me to keep all my articles at a green smiley.
Other features of Yoast SEO that I am using are generating sitemap, SEO title generation and adding meta description.
Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin which will monitor your website for broken links and missing images links.
Once it finds a broken link then you can update it through the plugin directly which is more convenient.
It can also allow you to prevent search engine from following your broken links or make it display differently in the post. But these two are not ideal solutions at all. I highly suggest that you avoid doing these and just fix the broken link normally.
Just remember that finding your broken links depends on how big your website currently is.
I will definitely use this plugin in the future but for the meantime I let the Google Search Console find my broken links for me.
Gutenberg is a WordPress plugin that I really fell in love with as soon as I started using it.
It is currently getting a lot of negative feedbacks from the community but I still think that it is a step forward to a more modern way of writing.
For me personally maybe I just love how clean my editor UI has become when I started using it. And I also find the editor toolbox really useful and fitted well in Gutenberg.
Basically Gutenberg is a WordPress editor plugin which enhances the user experience and user interface when you are creating your article.
What it does is provide an alternative to the Classic Editor with a more modern feel and approach.
It also hides some of the unnecessary sections when you’re editing so the editor looks really clean. And I feel like I am able to focus more on the content this time around.
I love Gutenberg and I highly suggest you try it yourself too.
UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore is a WordPress plugin which lets you backup your WordPress files and database.
What’s great about UpdraftPlus is that it lets you schedule your backups. So you can just set it one time and be rest assured that your website has backups if you will ever need them.
UpdraftPlus also lets you send your backups directly into the cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email.
For me personally I use it to backup my whole website to the Google Drive.
Autoptimize is a WordPress plugin which lets you optimize your WordPress website easily.
I myself have used many optimization plugins before but what makes me like Autoptimize is it’s simplicity.
Basically everything that I need in this plugin, I can control in just one page.
I used Autoptimize for minifying and optimizing my HTML, CSS and JS files. It offers a lot of options for you to optimize your files.
It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles. You can also inline the CSS in the page head or defer it. Or you can move and defer scripts to the footer.
Lastly is I also used it to set my CDN base URL address.
I will personally keep on using this essential WordPress plugin.
Cache Enabler is a lightweight WordPress plugin which lets you cache your pages easily.
A cache is basically a static HTML of your posts or pages that is served to your visitor instead of running the PHP scripts and querying the database all the time.
This removes a large amount of burden from the server as it will use less CPU and RAM resources.
This plugin integrates flawlessly with the Autoptimize plugin I mentioned above. So you can clear your cache through the Autoptimize admin bar.
I have been getting a lot of questions and compliments about how fast my website’s loading speed is.
Even though I have a full-width image and a whole lot of images in my homepage.
This is because I am using a CDN and I use CDN Enabler to connect to it.
Basically a CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. What it does is it allows you to save your static files on it like images, JS and CSS files.
If you do this your static files will be saved in multiple servers around the world. When a visitor comes into your site. Your static files will be served from a CDN data center close to where your visitor is.
This will make your static files load faster in your visitors browser.
I use this personally to connect to my KeyCDN zone alias.
Regenerate Thumbnails is a very handy WordPress plugin which lets you regenerate thumbnails for one image or for all the images that you have.
This will come in handy in situations like if you create a new custom thumbnail size.
Or for instance if you switch to a theme that requires images with different dimensions.
To regenerate the thumbnails all you have to do is go to the Regenerate Thumbnail dashboard section. And click Regenerate Thumbnails For All Attachments.
For me personally, I use it to the regenerate thumbnails when I create a custom thumbnail size.
I always urge my clients to use SSL on their website nowadays and this plugin really helps me implement SSL easily.
Basically Really Simple SSL will redirect all your links and settings to https automatically.
Without this plugin you will need to change your URLs manually to avoid loading issues, add redirection to htaccess, change your site URL and home URL settings etc.
This plugin will do all of these for you automatically and within just a few seconds. Saving you a lot of time especially when you’re a beginner who just wants to use SSL.
Also Google is urging everyone now to use SSL. If you are not using one on your website then you will see a not secure warning beside your website’s URL in the browser.
WooCommerce is a free E-Commerce WordPress plugin that lets you sell almost anything in your website.
It integrates seamlessly with WordPress and has become a crowd favorite ever since it was released.
The best thing about WooCommerce is since it is so popular a lot of plugin developers create plugins that lets you extend its functionality.
With WooCommerce you can sell both physical and digital products in your website.
You can also configure those products to have any number of attributes. If it is a digital product you can offer an instant download option as soon as they bought it.
I do understand that some of my options are a bit different from the others.
So for security instead of installing WPS Hide Login and WPS Limit Login. You might want to choose Wordfence Security instead as it is a feature packed security plugin.
And for performance instead of installing Autoptimize, Cache Enabler and CDN Enabler. You might prefer the WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache instead which offer all-in-one solutions for WordPress performance.
The only reason I used separate plugins is because I like my plugins to be lightweight and I only used plugins that specifically has what I want.
Conclusion
I hope that I provide you some helpful ideas on what essential WordPress plugins you should get after you installed WordPress.
All of the plugins I mentioned work seamlessly with one another and I found no issues so far.
Also keep your plugins updated at all times. Before you update the plugins make sure to create a backup of the whole site first using UpdraftPlus.