Introduction to Building a Free WordPress Website
Hey, my name is Dan, and in this video I'm gonna show you step-by-step how to create a WordPress website completely for free. And yes, that includes hosting, so you'll be able to run your WordPress website at zero cost.
We'll be using a free hosting provider, a free page builder, and only free plugins to build and run this website. I'll also show you how to get free access to hundreds of professionally designed website templates that work for pretty much any type of website. And all of these website templates are fully customizable using the free drag and drop page builder that I'm gonna show you.
And don't worry, even if you've never built a website before, we're gonna make this easy. There's not any coding involved, we're not gonna skip over anything. So you can easily just follow along and have your WordPress website ready by the end of this video.
Comparing Free Hosting: InfinityFree vs. FreeHosting.com
Before we install WordPress and build your site, you do need to understand some important things about free hosting to see if it's right for you. Now, not all free hosting is the same. Some hosts are faster, some have fewer limits, and some even give you a free website address so you can get started almost instantly. I've researched several of them, and in this tutorial we're gonna be using one that does give you a free website address. But before we set up your account, let's quickly compare two popular options so you can see why this one makes the most sense.
So here we've got InfinityFree on the left and freehosting.com here on the right. We'll compare them across five key areas, things that will make the biggest difference in how easy your site is to set up, run, and maintain.
So first up, free subdomain. InfinityFree gives you a free subdomain so you can launch without buying a domain name. freehosting.com doesn't. You'll need to bring your own, which means more setup time and cost.
Content rights are next. With InfinityFree, you keep ownership of your site's content, but they do have broad permissions to reuse content posted on their site. With freehosting.com, you also keep ownership, but their rights to use your hosted content are more limited.
Then we have what I'm calling account and inactivity. InfinityFree lets you have up to three free accounts, and they can delete inactive accounts, although they don't say exactly how long inactive means. freehosting.com seems somewhat stricter here. If your site doesn't get visitors or your domain stops pointing to their servers for 90 days, they'll delete the account without notice. Not exactly ideal for either host.
Next is backups and recovery. And again, neither provider here offers backups for free hosting accounts, so you're on your own to keep copies of your site's files and database.
And finally, I've added some testing notes here from my own experience. InfinityFree loads a bit faster and it has a smoother setup, though you will see ads all over the control panel. freehosting.com felt a bit clunky to set up and it had some small bugs along the way, particularly when I was using Chrome.
Based on all of these points, we're going to use InfinityFree for this tutorial. It's faster to get started and the free subdomain is a really nice bonus. Generally, free hosting, no matter which host you use, is best suited for those tiny projects or maybe even a proof of concept for your website. And the free subdomain from InfinityFree lets us get right to the WordPress install after signing up.
Creating Your Free InfinityFree Hosting Account
So in this first step, I'll walk you through how to create the free hosting account at InfinityFree and how to connect to your free subdomain. Once that's done, we'll be ready to install WordPress in the next step.
In the video description, click the link to get to the InfinityFree website so you can follow along with this tutorial starting on this page. I'll click Register Now, and then I'm going to enter my email address, and then I'll pick a password. Then agree that you've read the terms of service. And finally, click Sign Up.
Here, you'll be prompted to verify your email address, so I'll open that in a new tab. I'll find that email from InfinityFree, and then I'll click Verify Email Address. Now, we can go ahead and close these tabs for now. And I'll click Confirm.
Here, we can see that we have zero out of three free hosting accounts. To create one, click Create Account. And as you can see, we will be getting some ads during the signup process. I'll close this one. Then I'll scroll down. We can see here are the hosting plans. These three are paid, but we'll start with the free one. And again, in terms of features, it's pretty bare bones, but I'll click Create Now.
And then here we wanna choose our domain name. This is free, and we can add and change later. I like to use a different domain extension, free.nf, and for our subdomain, we just need to choose something unique. For this tutorial, I'll use MeticsInfinityFreeWordPress2.free.nf, and I'll click Check Availability. That looks available, and you can change this account label if you'd like. I'll leave this here. InfinityFree is going to generate an account username for us. They will also generate an account password, but I'm gonna change this, and I'll enter my own and then click here to open email consent and say I Approve.
Then click Create Account, and InfinityFree will start to set up our hosting. In my research, this does happen fairly quickly, and you can see here this is your automatically generated account username. Now, yours might take a little bit longer, but here we can see our domain. I'm gonna copy this, right-click Copy, and in a new tab, I'll paste and search, and it tells us our domain is ready. I'm gonna close this and then back in the InfinityFree account, we wanna go to Control Panel. Then here, click I Approve.
So now that we have an account and our free hosting is ready, it's time to install WordPress.
Installing WordPress via Softaculous
This process isn't quite as simple from within this control panel as when using paid hosting providers, but it's still relatively easy to follow. Once you're on this page, let's scroll down. Under the Software section, open the Softaculous Apps Installer.
Once we're on this page, you should see WordPress under the Top Scripts section. Find it and then click Install. Here you'll see your domain in this dropdown, and I'm gonna click Quick Install to change some of our settings down here. Scroll down to this admin account section. Here, we'll create login information that we'll use when we wanna edit our WordPress site. I'll click here to enter a new username. Then I'll hide this password and change it. I'll keep this admin email, as it's the same email that I signed up for InfinityFree with. I'm gonna scroll down and then click Install.
And in my testing, this finishes very quickly. And here we have a summary. I'm gonna right-click on this link and open it in a new tab. If we go up, you can see that our domain has changed from the parking page that InfinityFree initially displayed. This is a good indication that our WordPress install was successful. Let's close this, and then below our domain is our administrative URL. You can see it's the same with the exception of this /wp-admin/. Let's copy this full domain, right-click, Copy, come up to a new tab and paste.
From this WP admin page, we can log in using the credentials that we just created. This was the admin username, and then I'll enter my password here and log in. Great. Now, we've logged into WP admin and this is where we can control our WordPress site.
Installing Your Theme and Starter Templates Plugin
You'll see that we're currently on the Dashboard tab, and the next step that we wanna do now that we're in WP admin is to install our website's theme. A theme controls the colours, fonts, and layouts of our site, and we'll install a popular free theme called Astra. To do so, come down here to Appearance, then click Themes. Once here, click Add Theme. You may already see it, but if not, search themes here for Astra. Then I'll come over and select Install. Once it's done installing, click Activate.
Now that our theme is installed, we'll add the starter templates plugin. A plugin works like an app for your website. It adds new features, just like apps do on your phone. Starter templates gives you access to hundreds of professionally designed website templates that you can easily customise, and it's also free. To install it, let's come over here on the left side to Plugins, and then once here, come up to Add Plugin.
On the far right, click to search for plugins and type in Starter Templates. Scroll down, and this is the one we want. I'm gonna click Install Now. And just like our theme, once it's installed, click Activate. That will bring us to our installed plugins list, and under Starter Templates, click Get Started.
On this screen, we wanna build our website with classic starter templates, so click Build with Templates, and here we'll use Elementor as our page builder. Elementor is a drag and drop page builder for WordPress that lets you edit your site visually without writing any code. Now, if for some reason you don't see Elementor listed here as the page builder, let me quickly show you how you can enable it. So if you don't see it, click back here. Then click Exit to Dashboard. Come over on the left to Settings, and then scroll down to the bottom. If this is checked, you'll want to uncheck it, like mine is shown here. Then click Save Changes. Navigate back to Plugins, and then again, under Starter Templates, click Get Started. Once more, click Build with Templates, and if it was missing before, you'll now see Elementor. Click on it to go to the next page.
Choosing and Installing a Website Template
Now, let's choose a template for your site. A template gives you a ready-made design you can start with so your site looks professional from day one. You can browse the templates by these categories, and if we scroll down, you'll see that some of the templates are marked as premium. All the others are free, and Earth is one that I like to use because it works well for lots of different sites.
When you find a template you like, go ahead and select it. If you're unsure or want to change, you can click back here and you can always choose a new one, but I'll proceed with Planet Earth. At this point, you can upload a logo. You can change your font pairings or your colour palettes, but I'm gonna proceed with just the default options and then click Continue. On this screen, you can come down and click Skip this step, and you don't have to share your info here if you don't want. Just make sure to click that you understand and then you can click Submit & Build My Website.
You'll see the progress as your website gets built, and this usually only takes a few minutes. And there we go. This one only took 48 seconds. Go ahead and click View Your Website. In a new tab, your domain will open and you'll see the template that we've just selected and installed. Let's scroll to the top. And with our template installed, we can now begin to customise your site using Elementor's simple drag and drop interface.
Basic Editing with Elementor
I'll link to my recent Elementor tutorial where I go into detail about how this works, but let me show you the very basics here so you can get an idea of what's possible. Before we continue, I'm gonna close this tab, the InfinityFree control panel, and this one as well. Then in this top bar, click Edit with Elementor.
And you can see this is a little slow. That's one of the downsides about free hosting.
All right, so here the page never loaded, at least on the Chrome guest profile. You can see that Elementor is offering some troubleshooting tips. One way I've found to work around this is to open an incognito window. So here I have my URL typed out in an incognito browser, and I'm gonna type in /wp-admin at the end of this search. Click Enter. Here, I'll enter my login information like we've done before, and I'll click Log In. That brings us back to the WP admin panel, and if you wanna edit your site in Elementor from here, you can go to Pages and then if we hover over any of the individual pages, we can click Edit with Elementor here. And as you can see, this does finally load when using an incognito browser.
So this is one of the quirks that you might experience when you use free hosting. These are not issues that I typically experience with any other paid host. But now that we're here, you can see that the page is shown in its editable form. Outlined in magenta in these sections are containers. You can see that around the edge here, and all of the elements that make up your website, like the text and the buttons and the images, they're all organised within these containers. To add a new container, we can just kind of hover here, click the plus icon, and then once we have this new container, we can add elements by dragging in widgets from the left-hand pane, so I can bring in a text heading. That way our new container isn't empty. You can see the new heading within the new container in this structure pane. But I'll close this for now. If you hover over the container again, we can move it around with this drag handle. So I can move it below these images. And to delete a container and all of the elements within, you can just click the X.
We can also edit any of the elements that were included with the template. So if we scroll up to the top, just click on any text element and we can edit it right in line. Or anytime you have this element selected, you can find the options to change it in this panel over on the left. This Content tab is where we can change things like the title and link and HTML tag for an element like a heading. And then on the Style tab, here is where you'll find all the options that you can use to change the styling of the text.
And once you get familiar with the settings in the Content and the Style tab, all of the other elements work in a similar way. So let's close this and click on the button. We can change the type and text and link here on the Content tab of the button. And then in the Style tab, we can change all of the button styling. And if we scroll down, the same thing works with the images. So if I select this image, I can come over to Choose Image and then select files to upload, select the file, open it, click Select, and then just like the other elements, we can change the style of this picture on the Style tab.
Now, let's scroll back up to the top. In this top bar, you have a few options. Here you can see how your site looks on mobile or on a tablet. I like designing the site while on desktop. You can use the page dropdown to visit your other pages and start making changes to those. And then you can publish any changes with this button here. We can also preview our site with this button. Using Elementor, it's even easy to add new pages, change menu options, make changes to your website header and footer, and add new blocks to your pages using additional free templates.
If you're a beginner and want the step-by-step guide on how to make those types of changes, please do check out my Elementor WordPress tutorial linked in the description. The chapter timestamps are labelled, and you can use them to navigate right to the part of the tutorial that you wanna watch.
The Honest Downsides of Free Hosting
Before we wrap up, I wanna share my experience with some of the limits and frustrations that I ran into when testing free hosting providers. There are important negative aspects to free hosting that I think you should be aware of.
Broadly speaking, I like to think of free hosting as a great way to test out a site without spending any money at all. So like you've seen in this tutorial, it can be a good way to test out the WordPress install. We were able to try a theme and a template, you can see how you like using Elementor, and you can do all that without committing to paid hosting or even committing to a paid domain, because we're still using that free domain.
But one of the downsides to free hosting is that your website could get removed by the host for a number of reasons, and some hosts, like InfinityFree, do retain rights to use your content. That's why I personally don't like to count on free hosting as a stable, long-term solution. Even if free hosting providers don't run ads on your content, your website itself, there can be many ads in the account setup and the control panels, and that's exactly what we saw at the start of this video.
When I tested freehosting.com, the setup was a little buggy, especially when using Chrome. We just saw here how I needed to open an incognito window to access the Edit With Elementor view. Sometimes the WordPress installs on the free hosts can take a few tries. I had a few that didn't quite finish. And there are a few more steps to installing WordPress in your theme, your template, than there are when using paid hosting. Your website will typically load slower with a free host. Something that I've seen a lot in my testing. There is limited if any support, and there are usually other limits that might prevent you from running your website exactly how you would like.
In short, to summarise all of the drawbacks with free hosting, it can work, but like most things, you get what you pay for.
Recommendation for Paid Hosting and Conclusion
For all of those reasons, if you want to avoid those limits and inconveniences, my recommendation is to go with affordable paid hosting. I use Hostinger for many of my sites and it's far better than using free hosting. It's fast, reliable, WordPress is even easier to install, and a free domain is included. I've put a special discount link in the description so that you can save even more.
Free hosting is okay if you simply want to experiment with WordPress and Elementor, but when using our special link, you can host your website with Hostinger for less than $50 a year or for about $75 for two years.
If you do decide to go with Hostinger, I have a full step-by-step WordPress tutorial you can follow next. In that video, I go through the exact same process that we just followed here with free hosting, but I do it with Hostinger. Everything else is still free, but we'll use the premium hosting for all of the benefits it provides. Just click this next video or on the video link in the description below so that you can get your site set up the right way.
Thanks for watching.
