Create a blog in a few steps with OVHcloud

The very first thing to do is to decide on a topic for your blog. Most successful blogs focus on one area, so if you are an expert in a particular field, creating a themed blog could be worthwhile. By sharing your specific subject knowledge through quality content, you are bringing informational added value to your community of users. For example, if you are a globetrotter or you regularly like to go on a city breaks, you could create a travel blog. Passionate about amateur photography? Creating a photography blog could be a good idea. You can even do it as part of your business – nothing prevents you from creating a professional blog to share your knowledge or demonstrate your expertise.

Once you’ve found your topic, it's time to choose an address for your blog, also known as a domain name.

A domain name is the equivalent of a physical address, represented by the website’s URL. It is made up of two main elements: the first part is the name of the website, followed by the extension after the full stop (such as .co.uk, .com, .eu or .fr.). You can choose a domain name for your blog that aligns with its theme: for example, “delicious-recipes.com” if you want to create a food blog. Some bloggers prefer to use their first and last names as a domain name, especially if their site is dedicated to their personal or professional life. You can also create a brand name, which may or may not relate to the blog content that will be published afterwards. When you buy a domain name, you will own it for a minimum of one year, and you can renew it after that. With that done, it’s time for you to choose a CMS for your blog, depending on its purpose.

Once your blog is hosted, you can store content and files online, which are then visible to your website visitors. The good news with web hosting is that you can do it alongside reserving a domain name and creating a blog using a CMS. To host a blog in the most effective way, you need to take into account your website’s features and performance, such as the expected number of visitors, your file sizes, and whether you want to include a payment module or contact form. As a hosting provider, OVHcloud offers web hosting at a lower cost, ensuring that your blog is available 24/7.

If you host your blog with OVHcloud, you get a high-performance, secure, ready-to-use website at an affordable price. With anti-DDoS protection, your blog is always accessible to your users, with fast-loading pages.

A content management system (CMS) allows bloggers to create a blog easily, and then manage and edit its content without needing any specific technical knowledge. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress. WordPress is very easy to use and is a real leading platform in the blogging world, as it allows you to easily share text, images, photos, videos or sounds – you simply choose the plugins/extensions that are right for you. The customisation options are unlimited, with free or paid for WordPress themes (called templates) available all over the internet. By using OVHcloud to host a WordPress blog, this CMS can be set up for you in just one click. If you want to create an online store, you may prefer to use the PrestaShop CMS. This includes an online payment feature, which is handy if you do not know how to build an e-commerce-style blog. Joomla! and Drupal are two more well-known CMS platforms. These two platforms allow you to display your products or your brand as a showcase website. See also: find the best site for your blog.

The story of WordPress began in 2003 as a blogging tool, and it quickly established itself as a true content management system (CMS) allowing the creation of all kinds of websites: blogs, showcase sites, online shops, or even more complex platforms. Its success is down to its open-source model and a very active international community that constantly helps to enrich its ecosystem with themes and plugins.

WordPress is a particularly good solution for hosting a blog due to its great flexibility and customisation capabilities.

From an SEO perspective, WordPress has considerable advantages. The generated code is relatively clean and easily indexable by search engines, which provides a solid foundation for organic search engine optimisation. What’s more, many specialised plugins allow every aspect of content to be optimised, from meta tags to redirects, including internal linking. Among the most popular are Yoast SEO and Rank Math, which offer intuitive interfaces to guide the user in optimising every page or article on their website. This makes WordPress an ideal solution for blogs that you want to get high up search engine rankings.

WordPress also has a very active community, giving you an abundance of resources to resolve problems, learn to use the tool better, or discover new features. There is extensive documentation, specialised forums, and many freelance developers or agencies able to support the growth of your site. The tool also receives regular updates to enhance its security, improve its performance, and ensure compatibility with changing web standards.

Finally, the value for money of WordPress is particularly appealing. The CMS itself is open-source and free. The only costs are related to hosting, the domain name, and potentially the purchase of premium plugins or themes. This makes it a perfectly scalable solution: you can start with a small budget and gradually evolve your site according to your needs and growth.

Once you have written your first content and articles, you need to promote your blog in search engines so that it is well-indexed in terms of SEO and can generate traffic. The easiest ways to help make your blog more visible are to inform others of its existence, promote it via social media posts and leave comments on other blogs that are part of your community. Publishing articles regularly also helps to optimise your blog ranking, and it keeps your visitors coming back as you are offering them fresh content. A frequency of one article per week is still a good practice, especially if you don’t have much time to spend on it. Otherwise, there are many ways to make a blog more visible in the best search engine results (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.): through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).