WordPress offer you the option of setting up a website on your own hosting or using their hosting. For a variety of reasons (partly because I’m a bit of a control freak in that respect), I suggest that you use your own domain name on your own hosting. It leaves you a lot less open to the whims of an outside organisation and means that you’re in charge of your own destiny with regard to your website.

Most hosts offer a simple install of WordPress – there should be an option in the control panel that you were given details of when you bought hosting. It’s sometimes an obvious link inside the control panel or sometimes it’s found behind a button marked either Fantastico or Softaculous – they’re the two main options that website hosts use to make the installation as seamless as possible.

You’ll be asked for an administrator name in the setup process. This often defaults to “admin” and it’s well worth using a different name. Because WordPress is so popular and because “admin” is the default, it’s the first choice that hackers will try if they want to break in and disrupt your website – unfortunately those attempts are all too frequent but this simple step together with a strong (randomly generated) password will normally thwart them.

Once the main WordPress site has been setup, it’s time to change the default settings.

A lot of the ways that WordPress sets things up stem from its roots as being a blog platform rather than a way to run a modern website.

It puts in some default content so the first stage is to delete that – there is normally a “hello world” post in the posts section. Deleting that also removes the initial comment that’s put there.

Then delete the sample page in the Posts section.

Next, delete the “Hello Dolly” plugin that’s automatically installed.

Then decide whether or not to keep Akismet. This is the default WordPress plugin to combat comment spam. It does a good job but the current licence terms mean that it’s only free if you’re using it for a personal blog, otherwise there’s a charge. There are plenty of alternatives that do a reasonable job of combatting spam so you’re not duty bound to use Akismet.

Once you’ve deleted the default post and pages, it’s time to change some of the other settings.

The main one to change is under Permalinks. I normally select either Post Name or Custom Structure (in which case I set that to /%postname%/) rather than the default which leaves page names as an irrelevant number.

The other thing I do is tick the box on the Discussions page that means I always have to approve comments and untick the box that allows comments to be automatically approved if there’s been a previously approved comment. If my blog was super-busy I might untick that depending on how much I wanted to control comments.

It’s then time to customise WordPress using plugins.

These are extensions that affect how WordPress works. Some work behind the scenes, others are more obvious.

The ones I’ll tend to install are:

• Limit Login Attempts – this is another anti-hacker method and works unobtrusively
• WordPress SEO from Yoast – this makes it easy to make your WordPress posts and pages search engine friendly
• Contact Form 7 – a simple way of adding a contact form to your site that’s also customisable for near enough anything you want to add to the form
• Exclude Pages from Navigation – this stops pages from appearing in the menu system, which is useful for various reasons as well as making the menus less cluttered
• Share Buttons by AddToAny – one of umpteen options to add social sharing buttons for Facebook, etc. Just the one I prefer currently
• WP Shorties – this allows you to add links (like the one I did to hosting at the start of this page) that appear to be on your own site. It tracks the number of times each link has been clicked and a few other things
• WP Super Cache – one of several different WordPress cache plugins that help speed up the site
• WordPress Database Backup from Austin Matzko – a simple way to get a regular backup of your WordPress site. Whether you use this plugin or a different one is less critical than using one so that if you need to restore your site for any reason you can do so easily.

If you’d like to see this whole process in detail I’ve recorded a very affordable set of videos that you can get here that walk you through the entire process.