How to Build a Website with Kinsta
on 02 August 2022, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, FREE, Guides
by Bogdan
In this post, we’ll show you how to build a website with Kinsta.
WordPress has numerous hosting providers, with plans specifically dedicated to it. While the other hosting providers can host websites from other content management systems, Kinsta has been established to specifically host WordPress websites only. As a result of this specialization, Kinsta can provide hosting for WordPress websites that mean business. So if you intend to build a competent WordPress website with a 24/7 availability and thousands of monthly visits, Kinsta is for you.In this post, we’ll take you through a step-by-step process on how to build a WordPress website with Kinsta.
We’ll cover in this article:
What is Kinsta and what does it offer
Kinsta is a cloud-based managed hosting service for WordPress built on the Google Cloud Platform. It offers high-quality WordPress hosting while remaining easy to use. It has 30+ data centers globally, which you can pick from depending on where your site visitors are based.
Kinsta has WordPress-specific features on its web interface including being able to see which plugins are installed on your site at a glance. Kinsta prioritizes security and performance. If your site gets hacked, it will be placed on maintenance mode until everything gets sorted out.
Kinsta has multiple hosting plans with the basic one costing $35 per month and the most expensive (Enterprise 4) going for as high as $1650. If you're familiar with other hosting providers, you will notice that Kinsta hosting is quite pricey. Let's find out why.
Why is Kinsta Expensive?
Contrary to popular hosting providers such as Bluehost and GoDaddy which offer shared hosting, Kinsta offers dedicated WordPress hosting. This means that all the resources on which you host your WordPress website will be dedicated to your site. As a result of dedicated hosting, Kinsta ensures your website is always available all the time and it can handle spikes in traffic without slowing down.
Because Kinsta has been established particularly for WordPress hosting, it is fairly easy to build a WordPress website with Kinsta. In the next section, we’ll take you through a step-by-step process on how to do this.
How to Build a Website with Kinsta (Step by Step)
Although you can build any type of website with WordPress and Kinsta, because of the price, we recommend that you go for Kinsta WordPress hosting if:
- Your website is fairly large with thousands of visitors monthly.
- You intend to establish a reputable brand.
- You run a business that demands 24/7 availability.
- You want enterprise-grade features.
You can build a WordPress website with Kinsta, without writing a single line of code. That being said, you will need to put together some tools and technologies to enable you to do this. These are:
- A domain name - The address of your website that site visitors will use to find it. For example, wordpress.com
- A hosting service - To store your website’s files and avail them when a user accesses your website. Kinsta is the hosting service in this case.
- A content management system - To help you add and manage content on your website (WordPress).
- A website builder - To help you build attractive and high-converting pages for your website.
After knowing what you need, it’s time to get into the process.
1. Register for a domain name
Registering for a domain name is the first step to building your website with Kinsta. However, Kinsta is purely a hosting service, it doesn’t offer domain name registration. So, you’ll need to get your domain name from somewhere else. There are numerous domain registrars where you can get your domain name such as Bluehost and GoDaddy, but for this post, we’ll show you how to register for a domain name using Name cheap. Namecheap is really simple to use and offers some of the cheapest .com domain names.
To register for a domain name using Namecheap:
- Go to Namecheap’s website on your browser and type in your preferred domain name.
Make it simple and easy to remember. Don’t include hyphens, numbers, or any other special characters. You should generally go for .com, .net, or .org top level domains because they make your website sound more legitimate.
2. Click on the search button to find out if it’s available. If it’s available, it will display the price alongside an ‘Add to Cart' button. Click the button.
3. Next, click on 'Checkout' and it will take you to the cart page. If you have a promo code from an affiliate, use it here to get a discount.
4. To get an even cheaper deal, click the create account button and use your email and password to create a Namecheap account. Then go back to the checkout.
5. Confirm the order and fill in the account contact information on the next page.
6. Add your payment information on the next page and click ‘Continue’
7. Before continuing, you need to verify contacts for the domain name you’ve just purchased. Click on the verify contacts button and Namecheap will send a verification message to your email.
8. Log into your email and click on the ‘Verify’ button.
Now you have a domain name from Namecheap, let’s get Kinsta WordPress hosting.
2. Get WordPress hosting by Kinsta
On Kinsta’s website, you will be able to purchase a hosting plan and install WordPress. In this section, we’ll walk you through which plan you should choose, how to install WordPress on Kinsta in the right way, and choosing the correct settings.
Let’s get started.
1. Go to Kinsta’s official website and click on the view plans. Here you’ll see numerous plans ranging from the Starter plan to the Enterprise 4 plan.
2. Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for all plans if you’re not pleased with the service and you want to cancel it within this period.
Kinsta’s pricing plans are quite simple to understand. You just need to know the number of websites you want to build and the estimated number of monthly visitors you will be getting.
It goes like this:
- 1 website (25000 visits) - Starter plan: $35/mo.
- 2 websites (50000 visits) - Pro plan: $70/mo.
- 5 websites (100000 visits) - Business 1: $115/mo.
- And so on. If you decide to play yearly, you get 2 months free.
3. For this tutorial, we’ll select the Starter plan. Enter your details to create an account on the next page. Click on ‘Continue’.
4. Next, enter your payment information and click on ‘Finish up’.
3. Install WordPress on Kinsta
If the purchase is successful, you will be taken to Kinsta’s main dashboard where you can start creating your website. On this page, you can choose to create a new WordPress website or request a migration if you’re moving your pre-existing website from another hosting provider.
If you select the latter, Kinsta’s support team will help you to complete this migration. For this tutorial, we’ll create a new WordPress website.
1. Click on the Get Started button under the create your first site section.
2. Check the ‘Install WordPress’ box and provide the information on the fields available such as your domain name, name of the site, site title, and user name. You should also select the data center that is closest to where most of your site’s visitors are located.
3. If you want to create an e-commerce website, you can install WooCommerce directly from here by checking the box.
4. Once you’re done with everything, click on Add Site, and allow Kinsta a few minutes to set up your site.
3. Link your domain name to the hosting service
Once Kinsta is done setting up your site, you can proceed to link your domain name from Namecheap to Kinsta.
1. From the Kinsta dashboard, click on your site and copy your site’s IP address.
2. Log into your Namecheap account and click on the Advanced DNS tab.
3. Next, click on the Add new record dropdown and select A Record.
4. Under ‘Host’ type ‘@’ and paste your site’s IP on the next field and click on Save Changes.
5. Now go back to the Kinsta dashboard and click on Domains. Wait for about an hour for your domain to successfully point to Kinsta.
4. Install SSL certificate
An SSL certificate ensures that sensitive information on your site is secured. With an SSL certificate, credit card numbers, login credentials, social security numbers, etc., can be transmitted securely.
- Click on Tools and scroll down to the SSL certificate section and click on the dropdown.
2. Select 'Generate SSL free certificate' and give it a few minutes to lead.
You should also enable HTTPS and force traffic through it on the same section. After setting all of this up, you can now start building your website.
Build your WordPress website
First, you need to log in to your WordPress website. All you have to do is go back to Kinsta’s dashboard and click on domains then Open WordPress admin.
This will take you to the WordPress dashboard. Now, hover on your site’s name and click on ‘visit site’, you will see how your website looks from the front end.
At this point, your site has only the ‘Hello World’ page, no styling, and no content. So, you need to start building it. The first step is installing a theme. A theme ensures gives your pages a uniform look and ensures that you don’t have
Installing a WordPress theme
To install a theme on your WordPress website:
1. From your WordPress dashboard go to Appearance>Themes. Click on Add New. You will see a list of themes for you to choose from.
The Astra theme is the most popular WordPress theme because it works exceptionally well with page builders.
2. Hover on the theme you want to install and click Install. Once installation is done, click activate and that’s it.
3. If you’re looking for a theme with specific features, click on the Filter Feature button and get access to themes built for specific types of websites.
4. Check the box of the themes you want to filter and select apply filters.
With a WordPress theme, your pages will look presentable and more like a complete website. However, your website will look generic because there are thousands of site owners using the same theme. In addition, the theme might not contain the elements you need for your pages. Although you can use the customizer to edit your theme, it is heavily limited and not user-friendly.
To accelerate the creation of your WordPress site’s pages you will need the help of the Brizy plugin.
Build Attractive and High-Converting Pages with Brizy
A fundamental part of establishing a reputable website is creating pages that show that your site means business. So having dull and generic pages from your WordPress theme can severely hurt your chances of establishing your brand. Fortunately, with Brizy, you can ensure this doesn’t happen.
Brizy is a powerful but easy-to-use website builder for WordPress. With Brizy you can establish your brand by building unique, attractive, and high-converting pages. You get to drag and drop a wide variety of elements (36+) on your pages and make them as versatile as possible. And if you don’t feel like starting from scratch, import one of over 100 templates available and make edits to suit your site. You can add blocks to your site or create your own blocks.
One of Brizy’s out-of-the-box features is that you can brand this builder as your own with Brizy’s White Label feature.
Now that you know how Brizy can take your website’s design to another level, let’s see how you can set it up on your WordPress website.
How to set up Brizy on GoDaddy WordPress hosting
You can get started with Brizy for free to get a feel of the service and then upgrade to the pro version for much more capabilities.
1. Go to Brizy’s official website by clicking here and press the Get Started button.
2. This will take you to the download section at the bottom, where you can choose to download the free version or step up to the pro version.
3. When you click on the free version, you can provide an email address in order directly to Download for FREE. A download link will be sent to the email you’ve provided in the previous step.
4. Go back to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins>Add New. Click on Upload Plugin and select the zip file of the Brizy extension you previously downloaded and click on install now.
5. Activate it after installation is complete and that’s it, you’re ready to use Brizy to build your pages.
How to build your WordPress pages with Brizy
1. From your WordPress dashboard go to Pages>Add New
2. Name the page and click on Edit with Brizy. This will take you to the Brizy editor page.
3. Click on the Start Building your Page button at the center. On the next page, you will see a lot of options.
- If you want to build your pages from scratch, click Create your own box.
- Otherwise, there are numerous pre-built blocks that you can add to pages
- You can also choose between Light / Dark themes from different categories.
4. To add a block just click on it and it will be updated on your page.
5. From there you can change the alignment, images, typography, etc., of these blocks effortlessly.
6. You can also delete sections of these blocks to add new ones.
7. When you need to add a new block, just click on the add a new block button.
8. You can also switch the view between mobile, desktop, and tablet views.
This is just a small subset of what you can do with Brizy to build your pages. It is capable of helping you to realize a competent, robust, high-converting, and visually appealing website.
That’s about it for building a WordPress website with Kinsta. There are still some settings you might have to make on the WordPress backend depending on the type of website you want to set up.
Conclusion
Kinsta offers dedicated high-quality hosting for WordPress. Because it is built for WordPress alone, it is fairly easy to build a WordPress website with Kinsta. You will need to register for a domain externally because Kinsta doesn’t offer domain registration. After getting your hosting from Kinsta, you will need to build your site’s pages beyond your installed theme and the default WordPress customizer. Brizy enables you to do this simply and conveniently while creating attractive and high-converting pages for your WordPress site.
Start building better websites today!
Article by Bogdan
Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io
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