In this video I'll show you how to set
up WordPress on your Bluehost account
how to get a free SSL certificate on any
of your Bluehost domains and I'll
also show you how to get a professional
looking business email address
completely free of charge. As well as
optimize your Bluehost website for the
best possible performance after all of
the optimizations were done on my
Bluehost website was up to 30%
faster than before. So, without any
further ado let's start.
Obviously, the
very first thing you'll need is a plan
with Bluehost and for this tutorial I
assume you already have one so you can
skip to this time in the video for the
actual tutorial. But if you don't have a
plan with Bluehost they're actually one of
the better cheap web hosting
alternatives that are out there right
now and here's how to get one of their
plans with a discount. To get yourself a
plan with a 67% discount click the
link down in the description below, this
will take you to the Bluehost website
and automatically apply the discount. So,
I want to inform you that these links are
actually affiliate links and that means
if you make a purchase I'll make a
commission this is simply the best
possible way for me to keep my content
sponsor and ad free. And, I'm also able to
give you special discount codes on your
purchases so if you want to support the
channel go ahead and get yourself a
discount and use the links down below
but if you don't want to no hard
feelings. Now, you'll need to choose a
plan. I recommend you get the basic plan
if you only want to create one website
and the Plus plan if you plan to create
multiple websites. And, the choice Plus
plan
honestly isn't all that good it's going
to cost you around $4 more each
month when it's time to renew and the
benefits you're getting from the choice
plus plan are just not worth it in my
opinion. Here you can choose a free
domain name and you'll be taken to the
cart I recommend not buying any add-ons
at first as this will be much cheaper
for you but make sure to grab the free
email box if you're offered one. You can
always buy the add-ons later if you
believe that your website needs them.
With, that being said you can go ahead
and finish up the purchasing process.
Once you own a Bluehost account your
dashboard should look something like
this and it's now time to install
WordPress on your newly bought Bluehost website.
If you're in this menu and you
want to create a WordPress website
just click on my site and choose create
site. Type in your website name and the
tagline I recommend clicking on the
Advanced tab and typing in your email
address and login information that
you'll use to get into your WordPress
dashboard. Otherwise you'll get a
randomly generated password. If you have
more than one domain on Bluehost click
as this drop down menu and choose the
website you want WordPress installed on.
I recommend deselecting all of the
additional options as they'll slow down
your website if you're not using them
and you can always get them later if you
need. Once the installation is done
you'll be able to view your website and
access the WordPress dashboard. Your
WordPress website will also appear in
the my sites section of the Bluehost
dashboard. Now, your website is created
and it's time to install the SSL
certificate the good thing about
Bluehost is they actually offer free SSL
certificates with any domain that you
buy and they install them automatically.
By the way, an SSL certificate gives you
this lock next to your domain name not
having an SSL certificate will give
you a not secure message or even worse
this page. If for some reason your free
SSL certificate didn't activate
automatically make sure to contact the
support staff and ask them to activate
it for you from the server side. You can
reach the support staff by clicking the
question mark here and then just
clicking chat. By the way, if you ever
find yourself in a situation where you
need an SSL certificate but you don't
necessarily want to pay for one I
actually have a guide on how you can get
a free SSL certificate on absolutely any
web hosting provider completely free of
charge. You can find that guide right
here. Yeah somewhere around there. Once you
have your SSL certificate installed, you
can check if it's working by typing in
HTTPS followed by your website name. If
your SSL certificate is active you'll
see a green lock next to the domain name
and I also recommend navigating to your
WordPress control panel by going into my
sites and clicking log into WordPress
and install a plug-in called "Really Simple SSL"
this will make sure you
always use the secure version of your
website instead of the HTTP one.
At first
glance it might seem that Bluehost is
charging you extra if you want to use an
email box. Since, when you go to email and
office section there are only paid plans
available but there is actually a way of
getting a free email address hidden
under the hood. To create your free
business email address you'll first want
to go into the Advanced tab, scroll down
to where it says email accounts and
click on create. Choose the domain name
you want to use with your email account, 
this will influence how your email
address will look. I'll choose bhtutorial.site enter the name of
your email box for example I'll use info
and the password you'll use to log into
this email account.
Finally, click create. Your new email
account will now appear in the emails
tab to access your mailbox
you can always navigate back to this
page and click check email. The first
time you use the service you'll need to
select an email client
I recommend roundcube. Now, people that
send emails to info@bhtutorial.site
will reach this email box that
you just created you'll also be able to
reply to them as info@bhtutorial.site
this just looks so much more
professional than something that like
Gmail or yahoo.com so it's always
beneficial to create these free business
email accounts even if you don't plan to
use them much. So, at this point you
should already have a WordPress website
created and SSL certificate installed on
it and activate it and a free email
account that looks professional created.
It's time to optimize your Bluehost web
site for the best possible performance
using a couple of WordPress
plugins.
I've added a bit of design and
content just to make sure the website is
a bit heavier. So, we could have some data
to optimize as you can see the website
currently loads in 2.7 seconds which
isn't great. So, let's fix that. Super
quick disclaimer before making any major
changes to your website it doesn't
matter if it's now or sometimes in the
future always back your website up you
don't want to be in the middle of a huge
change when everything crashes down and
you're left without the backup so you
have to do it all over again.
First I'll delete everything extra that
came with my Bluehost installation that
I'm not using. This should reduce the
size of my website and increase the
loading speed quite a bit.
Next, I've installed 3 free plugins
to help me out with the optimization
leverage browser caching to fix my
caching issue that GT metrics has
detected. Smush to reduce the size of my
images. Since, this template has a lot of
images and a Hummingbird for further
speed and performance optimizations
let's start optimizing the website by
installing these plugins. First, click on
add new and search for the leverage
browser caching then install and
activate it. You don't need to configure
anything as this plugin does it all
automatically. Now, we can move on to
installing the second plugin called
Smush. What Smush does is it compresses
and optimizes the images on your website.
When installed you'll find a new
menu appear in your WordPress dashboard
so just click on it. Go through the
automatic setup and click bulk smush now
this will optimize all of the images on
your website. Keep in mind, that with the
free version you're only able to
optimize 50 images at a time. So, you'll
need to click continue once in a while.
When that's done you'll now need to
install a third plugin called
Hummingbird. This will show your
potential areas where you can further
optimize your website and give you the
tools to do it. Once the installation is
done you'll find Hummingbird in the
sidebar just like Smush. Run the
performance test and wait for it to
finish.
Now, you'll find areas that are slowing
your website down the most. You can
analyze and work on these optimizations
in every single area but from my
experience what's going to have the most
impact is asset optimization and caching.
So, navigate the asset optimization and
wait for a Hummingbird to scan
everything. You can skip the tour once
the scan is complete and here you will
see all of the files you can optimize in
various ways. For this tutorial, I'm only
going to compress uncompressed files in
the theme that I'm using. It's
recommended to do this one by one and
check if your website doesn't break and
if it does revert to the change. However,
since I'm just doing a demo website I'm
going to compress everything at once to
save time. Once you publish the changes
going to the caching settings and click
activate do this with every single
section that doesn't have caching
enabled. So, with all of these optimizations in place I was able to
reduce the loading speed and size of my
website by 30%. Instead of taking on
average about 3 seconds to load. Now,
it takes 2 and it doesn't weigh 3MB
anymore. Quite a nifty
improvement considering it was all done
for free and just in a couple of minutes.
I'll be making more web hosting and web
development related tutorials in the
future so if you're someone that has a
website or you're just interested in web
hosting I highly recommend you subscribe
but for now good luck making your
websites
