Today’s time is the time of the online business. Every business need a visibility to their customers. Online community can plays a huge role to grow you business. If you have a business idea and planning to earning some extra money through blogging? you may start by creating a WordPress blog. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform along with some other platforms such as bloggers.com.
Creating a WordPress blog is not so difficult as most of the people think about it. Even you do not need to be a Web designer or developer to create a blog or Website. You just need to have some basic knowledge of Internet services and the basic knowledge of Computer system. Yes, you must have passion about blogging. Here, we will discuss a step by step guide about how to create a WordPress blog. We will discuss the basic things you need to do in order to create a WordPress blog.

Steps To Create a WordPress Blog

The following major steps are required to create a WordPress blog and start blogging.

1. Selecting Type of Blog

To create a WordPress blog, you need to follow the following steps:
Go to WordPress let’s started page and choose the type of blog such as online tutorials blog, online marketing store, you want to create.

2. Selecting WordPress Blog Theme

In the next step, you need to select the blog theme you may like. There are various free and paid themes that you can use for your WordPress blog. For a beginner blogger, we recommend
to start with a free theme. If you have your own theme, designed by a developer, you can upload it to continue.

3. Selecting Domain Name for Your Blog

In the next step, choose a domain name (Blog name) that you have decided to use. You can also use an existing domain name, if you have already registered a domain name with
a domain hosting service providers such as BlueHost or GoDaddy. We will discuss about hosting services in a separate post.

If you have not registered your domain name yet, you will be asked to pick a plan that’s right for you from the available WordPress plans. For a new blogger, we recommend to start with
Free plan and then upgrade to paid plan in the future as per your requirements.

4. Complete the WordPress Sign Up Form

In the next step, complete the WordPress Sign Up form to proceed.
Now, activate your your WordPress account and login to your account. That’s all you need to create a free WordPress blog. But do not stop here, as this is just a starting of your blogging journey.

If you are planning a blog that is just for fun and for your personnel life, free WordPress blog may be sufficient for you. But if you are planning to create blog for business or online earning, Free WordPress would  not sufficient to fulfill your requirements. Because the Free blogging services does not offer great features that are really important for a successful blogging. There are various host service providers that provide cheap hosting services. However, we would personally love to recommend BlueHost as it is the best suitable host service for new bloggers and also simpler to use than others. You can start with the basic plan and then can upgrade the domain that suites to your blog.

Plugin are small piece of software code that enhance the capability, features, and performance of a Website or Blog. There are tons of paid and free WordPress plugins available that
bloggers and web designers may use as per their requirements. Professional bloggers remain always up-to-dated with the most popular and latest plugins. However, new bloggers
even might not be aware of few plugins that may help them a lot to success. Here, we will discuss the top ten free WordPress plugins that every blogger or Web Admin must have installed on his blog.

The list of free WordPress plugins is really pretty long and there are multiple plugins available for the one purpose. For example, for mail subscription, you may use, Mailpoet, MailChimp or any other one. However, we recommend you to first check out whether the plugin you want to use is trusted and authenticated or not? Else there might be something wrong on your blog.
So lets begin with the top ten free and most popular WordPress plugins:

1. Akismet

Whenever you create a new blog, there are million hungry spammers started to trap you about new Web designing services, better Web hosting services etc. They visit your blog and
started commenting (advertising their business) in your blog’s comment box. So it is very important to block these spammers. Here comes Akismet WordPress plugin that take care
of your blog from such kind of spammers. To use Akismet, just go to Add new plugin section in your WordPress Dashboard, and then use the search box to find Akismet plugin.
Follow the simple instruction to install it and do not forget to activate it.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

As per my personnel experience, new bloggers are remain concentrated to only add more and more posts (contents) on their blog. However, it does not matter how much content on your blog is available if the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo do not redirect users to your blog. If the search engines do not know about your content, how and why they will redirect their sequesters to your web pages. That’s why you should use Google XML Sitemaps plugins as a essential WordPress plugin for your blog. Actually, this plugin generates a sitemap of your web pages that helps the search engines to index your blog in better manner.

3. Yoast SEO

Your web pages may have valuable contents but the targeted visitors may not get your content, if your blog’s SEO performance is not good. Learning SEO techniques required a lot of time and technical knowledge. However, there are multiple plugins that may help you to enhance your blog’s SEO performance. I personally love and recommend the Yoast SEO plugin.
As it is simple and free to use.

4. W3 Total Cache

Every user wants fast internet services in nowadays. When visitors visit your blog, they do not wants to waits for too long to let show the content of your web pages. When we search a query on Google, we typically open multiple webpages in multiple tabs. The tab or web page that opens first, we get engaged with that and close the other slower ones. So the speed of your web pages should be pretty fast to compete others. The W3 Total Cache enhance your web site’s speed.

5. MailChimp

Collecting mails of your visitors help you to keep them engaged with your upcoming posts (events) on your blog. If a user love the content of your blog, they subscribe your blog for upcoming posts and events. If you have the contact information of your visitors, you can update them anytime about the changes of your blog, posts, contents, or digital products. MailChimp is one of my favorite mail collector plugins as it allows you to send a notification to up to 2000 users free of cost.

6. Jetpack

Jetpack is a powerful, most popular, and must have plugin for every WordPress website. It provides a pack of some excellent features for your WordPress blog that takes care of your site’s security, performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance and a lot more.

7. Contact Form 7

We hope you must have used this plugin before but may not be aware of it. Have you ever contacted to any website owner, blogger, or organization by clicking the Contact Us link? Yes, there is a plugin behind it that is mostly Contact Form 7 plugin. It allows your visitors to send their queries or ask something more about you and your businesses . After installing it, just go to settings to define what you want to include in the Contact Form.

8. WP Smush

If your blog has a lot of images-based contents, your slower site load speed may frustrate your visitors. Do not worry, there are multiple plugins for you that help you to enhance your blog or website’s load time. One of the best free image optimization plugins that you should consider to use is WP Smush plugin. It reduces the size of images without decreasing the quality of images.

9. Share Buttons by AddThis

Social media plays all the important role to grow your online business in nowadays. You must use as much as possible popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your online businesses. There are various social media sharing plugins are available for the WordPress bloggers. The most popular among those is Share Buttons by AddThis. Its free and simple to use.

10. Duplicate Posts.

People usually do not accept that there might be something wrong with them as happens with others. But actually, we realize our mistakes when we do not take things seriously. We never face any challenge until our blog (site) is running smoothly. Even few bloggers do not think to make a backup plan until/unless they have such a kind of bad past experience. So, we highly recommend you to be careful always in your business as well in your life. In term of blog/website, install Duplicate Posts plugin and keep the backup of your posts/contents. If something goes wrong, so you can use the archived data to resume your services quickly.

In this tutorials, we have listed the most popular and free WordPress plugins that every blogger should use on their blogs and websites. Hope, you have loved it. We would love to hear from you about your views and ideas on this. Let us know about any missing plugin that you think must have included in our top ten free WordPress plugins list.