How to create a WordPress blog: the hosted or self-hosted decision, the settings to fix before the first post, and what to publish in week one

Creating a WordPress blog is three decisions and about an hour of settings. The decisions: whether to use the hosted service at WordPress.com or install the free WordPress software on hosting you control, what the site is called, and what the URLs will look like. The settings matter more than the theme, because two of them are painful to change once people and search engines have started using your links. Everything after that is writing.

The decision that is hard to reverse: hosted or your own

There are two things called WordPress and new bloggers lose days to the confusion. One is free software. The other is a hosting company that runs that software for you.

	WordPress software, installed on your own hosting	The hosted service at WordPress.com
What you pay for	The software is free. You buy hosting and a domain.	A plan. There is a free tier and several paid ones.
Who handles updates, backups and server security	You, or your host, or whoever you pay	The service
Plugins	Any plugin, including ones you write yourself	Available on the paid plans. Its own support says installing plugins is available on all WordPress.com paid plans, from the WordPress.org repository of over 50,000, or uploaded, or built by you.
Themes and code editing	Any theme, and you can edit the code	Depends on the plan you buy
Who to call when it breaks	Your host, or nobody	Their support

Plan names, tiers and what each one allows change, so check their current pricing page rather than any article, including this one, for what a given plan includes today.

How to choose in one question. Do you intend to install plugins, run code, or own the whole stack? If yes, install the software on your own hosting from the start, because moving later means a migration. If you want to write and not administer a server, take the hosted service and spend the saved hours on posts. There is no wrong answer here, only an expensive answer if you pick the restricted one and then outgrow it.

What you need before you start, if you are self-hosting

WordPress publishes its own requirements, and a host that fails them is a host to skip. As of 20 October 2026 the published requirements are:

• PHP version 8.3 or greater. Older versions still run but are end of life, which WordPress itself says may expose your site to security vulnerabilities.
• MariaDB 10.11 or greater, or MySQL 8.0 or greater.
• HTTPS support. Not optional in practice: browsers mark pages without it, and nothing else on this page matters if the site shows a warning.
• A web server. WordPress recommends Nginx or Apache and notes that any server supporting PHP and a database will do. Its own sample hosting request asks for Apache with the mod_rewrite module, which is what makes readable URLs work.

You also need a domain name. Buy the domain somewhere you can see and change its DNS records, keep the registration in your own name and your own email address, and do not let a developer or agency register it for you. A domain somebody else controls is the one asset in this list you cannot recover by rebuilding.

The install

Most hosts offer a one-click WordPress install, and using it is fine. Manually, the sequence is: create a database and a database user, upload the WordPress files to the directory you want the site to answer from, visit the site in a browser, and fill in the database details and the site title when it asks. WordPress writes its own configuration file and creates the tables. Read the install steps from WordPress's own documentation rather than from a tutorial, because hosting panels change and third-party screenshots age badly.

Two things to get right at install time rather than later. Choose the administrator username as something other than "admin", and set the site address with or without www and then never change your mind, because every link you publish from here on carries that choice.

The settings to fix before the first post

Do these in this order. The first two are the ones that are expensive to change later.

• Permalinks. Settings, then Permalinks. WordPress's own documentation lists the common settings as Plain, Day and name, Month and name, Numeric, Post name, and Custom structure, and says the default uses day and name. Choose Post name. It gives you example.com/your-post-title, it carries no date to make a post look stale, and it survives moving a post between categories. Decide now: changing a live permalink structure later changes the address of every post you have published, which is the usual cause of a blog losing its traffic overnight.
• Search engine visibility. Settings, then Reading. There is a checkbox that discourages search engines from indexing the site. Leave it ON while you are setting up and writing the first pages, and turn it OFF the day you want to be found. Forgetting to turn it off is the single most common reason a new blog gets no visitors for months.
• Site title and tagline. Settings, then General. The tagline ships with a placeholder. Replace it with a plain description of what the blog is about, because it appears in several themes and in some search results.
• Timezone and date format. Also under General. Worth ten seconds now and confusing for years if wrong.
• Your display name. Users, then your profile. By default WordPress may show your login username as the post author. Set a display name and a short biography.
• Comments. Settings, then Discussion. Decide whether you want comments at all. If you do, require approval before a comment appears. An unmoderated comment form on a new blog fills with spam links within weeks.
• Delete the sample content. The Hello World post, the sample page and the pre-installed plugins you are not going to use. Every plugin left active is code you have to keep updated.

A note on the Permalinks screen worth knowing: WordPress's documentation says simply visiting that screen flushes the rewrite rules, which is why "go to Settings, Permalinks, then click Save" is the standard first fix when readable URLs suddenly return a not found error.

The theme, and how little time to spend on it

Pick a theme, publish ten posts, then revisit it. Choosing a theme before you have written anything is the most reliable way to spend a weekend and have an empty blog. When you do choose, judge it on how fast it loads, whether the body text is comfortable to read on a phone, whether headings are real headings rather than styled paragraphs, and whether it is actively maintained. If you want the full checklist for that judgement, see what makes a WordPress theme search ready.

If the blog is part of a business site and the design has to carry a brand, that is a build rather than a theme choice, and the scopes and handover terms are set out in our guide to WordPress design and development agencies and the three kinds of build.

The pages to publish before any posts

• About. Who writes this and why anybody should believe them. Name a person. This page gets read more than new bloggers expect, and it is the page an assistant or a search engine uses to work out what the site is.
• Contact. A way to reach you that is not a form you never check.
• Privacy policy. WordPress generates a draft for you under Settings, Privacy. Edit it so it describes what your site actually collects.
• A home page decision. Settings, Reading lets the home page be your latest posts or a static page. Latest posts is right for a blog. A static page is right when the blog is one part of a business site.

What to publish in week one

Five posts is enough to stop the blog looking abandoned and enough to tell you whether you enjoy doing it. Make them specific rather than introductory.

• One post answering a question you get asked repeatedly. You already know this answer, so it will be good, and somebody is already searching for it.
• One post that shows your work. A process, a before and after, a thing you built and what went wrong.
• One list or comparison. Two options a reader is choosing between, and the honest case for each.
• One post with a number in it. Something you counted, measured or tested yourself. This is the post that gets linked.
• One post you can update forever. A reference you will come back to, so the blog has at least one page that improves with age.

Skip the post introducing the blog. Nobody is subscribed yet.

Once there are ten posts

Now the technical work is worth doing, because now there is something to find. WordPress generates far more URLs than you have content: author archives, date archives, tag archives, feeds and attachment pages all exist by default, and most of them should not be competing with your posts. That is the next job, along with the plugin decision, and it is covered in full in our guide to WordPress SEO settings and the index bloat problem. Set up a search console account for your domain at the same time, so you can see what the engine has found.

Questions about creating a WordPress blog

Is WordPress free?

The software is free. Running it is not: you pay for hosting and a domain, or you pay for a plan on the hosted service. Budget for the domain renewal every year, because losing it is the one mistake with no cheap fix.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org, which should a new blogger pick?

If you want to write and not administer anything, the hosted service. If you expect to install plugins, run your own code or move hosts later, install the software yourself from the beginning. The migration between them is possible and it is work.

Do I need a plugin to start?

No. Write five posts first. Every plugin is code you have to keep updated and a thing that can break your site, so add them when you have a problem to solve rather than in advance.

Which permalink structure should I use?

Post name, in almost every case. Set it before you publish. If you change it on a live blog, every existing post gets a new address and you will need redirects from the old ones.

Why is my new blog not appearing in search results?

Check Settings, Reading first and see whether search engine visibility is still discouraged. After that, a new site simply takes time to be crawled and indexed, and a blog with five posts and no links pointing at it has very little for an engine to work with.

How often should I post?

At a rate you can keep for six months. Two good posts a month beats eight in the first fortnight and nothing afterwards, because an abandoned blog is read as abandoned by people and by crawlers.

Can I move my blog to a different host later?

Yes, and it is routine. Keep the domain in your own name, keep an export of your content, and the move is a day's work. This is the main practical argument for self-hosting from the start.

The reader who never loads your blog

A blog has always had two audiences: the person reading it and the crawler deciding whether to show it to the next person. There is now a third. When somebody asks an assistant who to use or what to read on a subject, the answer names a few sources and a few companies, and it is assembled from pages like yours without anybody clicking through. That means a blog can be doing its job in a place you will never see in your analytics, and it can also be invisible there while ranking perfectly well in search. AI Knows Us asks those questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and records who gets named and what the answers were built from, which is the one part of a blog's reach that no dashboard in WordPress reports.