When I decided to launch this blog, I only had around 45-60 minutes to spare each day. So here’s how I went about it…
Day 1: Domain Time Spent: 60 minutes (this was on 2nd April, 2021)
Did a little hunting, looked for some .com domains prefixed with ‘wp’, tried a few I had shortlisted but those weren’t available. I checked for wpcubicle and was thrilled it was available! Decided to purchase a domain from GoDaddy.
Day 2: Hosting Time Spent: 60 minutes
I didn’t spend too much time researching this because I was keen on Liquidweb. I have experienced their support earlier and it is truly stellar. The Liquidweb team is very knowledgeable, they go out of their way to help you and always share updates when they are working on your problem or hand over the ticket from one support person to another. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was whether to go in for their Managed WordPress Hosting service (used to be Nexcess until it was taken over by Liquidweb) or VPS. What I liked about the managed WP hosting was that it would free me from worrying too much about backups, updates and securing the website. And a minor plus point was that I could configure a free SSL certificate too easily.
I got on to a chat with their support team and asked a few questions like –
Will I be able to install any themes or plugins I want to? (Yes)
If I need to move from their managed WordPress hosting to a VPS, will they be able to help me do that? (Yes)
What support can I expect if my website is hacked? (will help clean it up and restore backups)
I got the answers I was looking for and zeroed in on their lowest-end basic managed WordPress hosting plan (called Spark) for one website. Paid for the whole year to get a minor discount there and applied the coupon code 4MOFREE which apparently is supposed to get me 4 months free. I only saw some discount (that didn’t add up to the cost of 4 months) applied after applying that code though, didn’t see the renewal date delayed by 4 months either. So am not sure what the coupon is supposed to do.
Day 3: Getting ready to go live Time Spent: 60 minutes
I was looking forward to putting my hosting plan to use and see my website go live. The set up was fairly intuitive but they also had some useful documentation to help get started.
Next, I set up a free Cloudflare account and added wpcubicle.com there, pointing it to the IP address shown in my Nexcess dashboard. It showed me the name servers I should use. So I then headed over to GoDaddy to change the name servers.
I then set up the SSL for my website via my Nexcess dashboard (Step 8 here)
Went back to Cloudflare (SSL/TSL tab-> Edge Certificates) to make sure http://wpubicle.com redirects to https://wpcubicle.com.
Yay! with that my website was live. Typed in wpcubicle.com in my browser and was so kicked to see my website show up!
Day 4: Set up my email Time Spent: 30 minutes
I wanted to set up my email with @wpcubicle.com and used Google WorkSpace for it. After you sign up, there’s a neat wizard-like walkthrough of the next steps that need to be done, including creating MX records in Cloudflare to point to gmail. Pretty straightforward. You get a 14-day free trial too.
Day 5: Set up Analytics, SEO plugin Time Spent: 45 minutes
Installed Google’s WordPress plugin and used it to create my Google Analytics and Google Search Console account too. Simply install it and follow the setup instructions. If you are worried about privacy though, please be sure to read all the warnings about the access that you are sharing with Google and opt out wherever you want to.
Installed Yoast’s free WordPress SEO plugin and again, simply followed the steps the plugin shows you, to set it up.
Day 6 to Day 50: Content, Content, Content Time Spent: Daily average of 90 -120 minutes (planned)
The plan is to complete 15 posts in the next 45 days
I don’t plan to install any more plugins, or do anything else for the remainder of this month, except plan my website’s content. Later, much later i.e. only after the website starts receiving traffic, will I look into stuff like getting subscribers to sign up to my email list, creating social media profiles, doing guest posts on other blogs etc).
I am still on Day 18….more to follow