If you are a small business and wish to create a website at low cost then this exactly I am going to cover in this post.
So lets dive in.
Step-1 Book Hosting for your website
Hostinger is a popular website hosting company that provides great services at very low prices, which makes it very popular for hosting any kind of low cost business website.
Here are the steps we need to take to book a hosting with Hostinger:
1- Goto Hostinger website, If you are in India you can visit Hostinger India website. Then go to Web Hosting from the very top.
Note: You don’t have to choose WordPress Hosting, A normal shared web hosting will just work fine.
2- Choose your Best plan:
Now we need to choose a hosting plan. I would highly recommend you choose as per your needs and budget. The price plans might change when you visit the site
But make sure you choose a plan which offers at least Free domain with Free SSL certificate.
Once you finalize your hosting plan, Just click on “Add to cart“
3- Choose your hosting plan term:
Now its time to choose the plan term. This is the best part about Hostinger Hosting service. You can choose multiple hosting payment terms. From 1 month to 48 months, you can buy hosting as per your budget or requirement.
Although I would recommend you to choose at least 12 months plan to get the best value and a free domain for first year.
Note: Just in case you cancel your hosting within 30 days, you get full refund. But it will not refund your domain purchasing cost. Once you buy a domain, it’ s now locked for at-least one year.
4- Create an account and checkout
Once you select your hosting plan period our next step is to create an account. So make sure you enter a valid Email ID to create your account with Hostinger.
After that, select your payment mode. These modes may be different for your depending upon the location where you are paying from. So, Fill in all the details and proceed with the payment.
Once the payment is done, You will get an email for account confirmation and after that you can login in your Hostinger hosting panel.
Step-2 Get Free Domain for your website
In this step, we will claim our free domain for our low cost website as per our Hostinger plan.
Once you make the payment you will be redirected to a page like this as below. Now Once you click on the “Start” button it will start the onboarding process.
But let me show you everything from scratch, So we will not start this wizard but will click on the Hostinger Logo on the top.
This will take you to the Dashboard of your Hostinger hosting account and from here. We will first claim our Free domain and then set up our hosting account.
So let’s first click on the button “Claim domain”
You will see a pop-up where you can enter the domain name that you wish to book for your business website. Make sure you choose .com as the domain extension. If .com is not available then try with some extensions.
And one you finalize the domain then just click on “Claim domain“.
And on the end you just need to fill up some basic contact information as the domain owner and you are done.
It might ask you to choose a hosting plan but you can skip that part because we will do that from scratch in the next step.
Step-4 Install WordPress
We are going to use Hostinger’s in-built Auto Installer to install WordPress on our newly added domain for our website
In order to install a fresh copy of WordPress on our new Hostinger hosting account. Here are the steps we need to follow:
1- Goto “Websites” from the top menu and then click on “Manage” button on your recently added domain.
2- Then from the left-hand side menu, choose “Websites” and then choose “Auto Installer“
3- On the next page, Select WordPress for the options available.
4- On the next screen, Fill in all the details about your new WordPress setup and then click on “Next“.
5- Once the Installation is done, We land on the dashboard of the Hostinger website manager, which provides a lot of options for various things like live website link, daily backup, and website backend link, etc.
Ensure you note the username and password in a safe place for future reference.
Step-5 Install theme for our Website
We highly recommend using the ASTRA theme for any website. Using this theme you can do any customization you wish along with some amazing performance.
Now to make our low cost website we need a low cost theme or Free theme, we will use a Free theme in this case. So, To install a theme on our WordPress website, first, we need to login into the admin area of our website. For that, we need to visit <yourwebsite.com>/wp-admin/ and then enter the username and password as created in the previous step.
After that, these are the steps we need to follow in our WordPress admin area:
1- Go to “Appearance” and then click on “Themes“.
2- Click “Add New Theme” from the top and then search for “ASTRA“. Chances are you don’t have to search for it, ASTRA theme will appear in the top 4 themes in the WordPress theme library.
3- To install the theme, Just click on “Install” and then click on “Activate“.
Step-6 Install Required plugins
To make a useable low cost website, we need to install some plugins on our website. We are going to install Free plugins only to create this entire website. Using these plugins we can create any kind of blog or website.
1- First goto “Plugins” and then click on “Add New“
2- Then search for “Spectra“. This plugin will help us create some amazing-looking web page layouts by using the Block editor.
To install this plugin, click on Install Now and then click on “Activate“
3- After this, the next plugin we need to install is “Starter Templates“. So for that, we need to follow the same process. Search the plugin and then Install and then Activate the plugin.
And that’s it, These are the two basic plugins that we need to create our website.
After that, these are the steps we need to follow in our WordPress admin area:
Step-7 Create Layout using AI
We are going to use AI to generate our website template and then customize that using Astra theme and Spectra plugin.
To create our website layout. We are going to use the AI feature of the Starter Template plugin. Let’s see how it works.
1- As soon as we Activate our Starter Template plugin, We can choose how we wish to generate our website—either using Readymade templates or AI.
Of course, we will choose AI and click on “Try the New AI Builder“
2- For first-time users, it will ask to connect our website to ZipWP account. This will be the free account with around 1000 AI credits, Which is good enough to create our website and even write content for the website (which we will cover later).
So we need to click on continue.
3- Now we just need to follow a few steps, and give basic information about the business for which we wish to create the website. This is the same process we followed while creating a WordPress website using AI with ZipWP.
4- At the final stage, you should get your website’s first draft with a quick customization panel. But to access the full customization options, we need to access the WordPress backend of the website using the URL <domainname>/wp-admin
Step-8 Create Inner Pages
Just like our home page. We are going to use AI to generate our inner pages as well.
Now let’s say you wish to create ABOUT US page for your website. Now let’s see how we can do that using AI.
1- From “Pages“, click on “Add New Page“
2- Lets name the page as “About Us” and now in order to create or design this page. We are going to use “Template Kit” option from the top left corner.
3- From this “Template Kit” We can choose the type of pattern/content we wish to import into our page. We can choose the variety of block editor patterns available in different categories.
The best part is all of these patterns are already using our theme’s global color pallet and typography.
4-To add/insert any pattern on the page, just click on “insert” and the pattern will be added on the page.
Step-9 Create content using AI
We are going to use the power of AI to generate content for our website. For that, we are going to use a powerful and Free tool.
In the previous step, while importing the pattern, the content we imported was generic. Instead of that, we can import the same pattern with content generated using AI, specific to our website.
1- From the same “Template Kit” popup, this time click on the gear icon and select “Personalized Library“.
2- This will start the process of connecting our website to the ZipWP AI platform. It may ask you to create a free account on the Zipwp platform during this process.
This is the same process that we need to follow while creating a website using Zipwp AI. Now it’s using the same steps to understand our website so that it can fill the content in various pattern templates tailored for our website.
3- Once the process is complete, this is how we get the new updated patterns with custom-tailored content for our website.
Now, We can use this AI-generated content and pattern to create our website’s inner pages and various other sections.
