To make a WordPress website the traditional way, you need four things: a domain name, web hosting, the WordPress software installed on that hosting, and a theme to give the site its design. Once those are in place, you create your pages, add your content, install a few plugins for things like contact forms, and publish. For a small business site, the whole process takes anywhere from a weekend to a couple of weeks if you’ve never done it before. Total cost: roughly €100–300 for the first year if you do it yourself.
There’s also a faster way. Instead of doing each of those steps yourself, you can have an AI design consultant build the entire WordPress site for you based on a 15-minute conversation. You answer questions about your business, pick your favourite from three custom design options, and the AI generates the complete multi-page site: pages, content, contact forms, mobile design, the whole thing. You still get a real, self-hosted WordPress site that you fully own. That’s what we built DesignThisSite to do, and it’s the route we’d genuinely recommend for most small business owners who don’t want to spend their weekends learning WordPress.
This guide covers both routes so you can pick the right one for your situation. But if you just wanna try it yourself, feel free to talk with Maya, our AI design consultant.
What you need to make a WordPress website
Before we get into the steps, here’s what every WordPress site needs, regardless of which route you take:
A domain name. This is your web address, yourbusiness.com. You buy it from a registrar like Namecheap, Porkbun, or your hosting company. It costs about €10–15 per year.
Web hosting. This is the computer that stores your website files and serves them to visitors. WordPress needs hosting that supports PHP and MySQL, and almost all hosts do. Decent shared hosting runs €5–15 per month. SiteGround, Hostinger, and Kinsta are popular choices, but there are dozens of good ones.
The WordPress software. This is free. It’s downloaded from wordpress.org and installed on your hosting. Most hosts offer one-click installation so you don’t have to do it manually.
A theme. This determines what your site looks like. WordPress comes with a few default themes, there are thousands of free ones in the WordPress directory, and there are paid themes from places like ThemeForest. A theme is essentially a design template, and that template part is where most WordPress projects start to wobble, which we’ll come back to.
Plugins for any extra features. Want a contact form? Install a contact form plugin. Want to take payments? Install WooCommerce. Want better SEO? Install Yoast or RankMath. Plugins are how WordPress extends beyond the basics.
That’s the toolkit. Now here’s what to do with it.
The traditional way: making a WordPress website yourself, step by step
If you want to build it yourself, here’s the full process. We’re going to be honest about how long each step actually takes, because most “make a WordPress site in 10 minutes” tutorials are technically true but practically misleading. They show you how to install WordPress, not how to end up with a finished site you’d actually show to a customer.
Step 1: Buy a domain name (15 minutes)
Pick a name that’s short, easy to spell, and ideally a .com or your country’s top-level domain. Check it’s available, buy it, and you’re done. If your business already has a name, this is straightforward. If not, expect to lose an hour to brainstorming. Cost: about €10–15 per year.
Step 2: Sign up for hosting (30 minutes)
Pick a host, sign up, choose a plan. For a small business site, the cheapest shared hosting plan is usually fine for the first year or two. Connect your domain to the host (most hosts walk you through this with a wizard, but if you bought your domain elsewhere, you’ll need to update the nameservers, which can take a few hours to propagate). Cost: €5–15 per month.
Step 3: Install WordPress (10 minutes)
Most hosts have a one-click WordPress installer. Click it, create your admin username and password, and you’ll get an empty WordPress site at your domain. This is the part where the “10-minute tutorials” usually end. In reality, you’ve now got an empty site that looks like nothing.
Step 4: Pick a theme (2 hours to 2 days)
This is where most people lose the most time. You’ll browse free themes in the WordPress directory, possibly buy a premium one from ThemeForest, install it, look at it, decide it’s not quite right, install another one, and repeat. Eventually you’ll commit to one and start customising.
The honest problem with themes: the demo always looks better than your version. The demo has professional photos, perfect copy, and content carefully chosen to fit the layout. Your version has your photos and your copy and won’t look the same. This is the point where a lot of DIY WordPress projects start to feel discouraging.
Step 5: Customise the theme (1 to 5 days)
Now you change the colours, the fonts, the header, the footer, the layout of the homepage, and so on. Depending on your theme, this happens in the WordPress Customiser, in the theme settings panel, or in a page builder like Elementor. Each option has its own learning curve.
You’ll spend a lot of this time fighting with things that should be simple: making the logo the right size, getting the menu to look right on mobile, figuring out why a section has too much padding, and so on. WordPress is powerful, but the design layer is not friendly to beginners.
Step 6: Create your pages and add content (1 to 3 days)
Write your homepage, about page, services page, and contact page. Add images. Format everything. Make sure it reads well and the call-to-action buttons go where they should. If you don’t have copywriting experience, this is harder than it sounds. Most small business websites have weak copy because writing about your own business is genuinely difficult.
Step 7: Install essential plugins (1 hour)
A contact form plugin (WPForms or Contact Form 7). An SEO plugin (Yoast or RankMath). A caching plugin for speed (WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache). A security plugin (Wordfence). A backup plugin (UpdraftPlus). Set each one up.
Step 8: Make sure it works on mobile (1 to 4 hours)
Open every page on your phone. Find the things that are broken: text too small, buttons cut off, images stretched. Go back into the theme and fix them. Repeat.
Step 9: Go live and test everything (1 hour)
Make sure your forms send emails. Make sure your links work. Make sure Google Analytics is tracking. Submit your site to Google Search Console.
Total time and cost for the DIY route
Realistic time investment: 30–60 hours of work, spread over two to four weeks for someone who hasn’t done this before. Realistic cost: €100–300 for the first year, depending on whether you bought a premium theme or page builder.
Realistic outcome: a working WordPress site that probably looks like the theme you started with, plus or minus your colours. Whether that’s good enough depends entirely on what your business needs from its website.
The faster way: have AI make your WordPress website
If reading the section above made you slightly tired, you’re not alone. That’s roughly the reaction we had when we built DesignThisSite. The traditional process works, but the time and the learning curve are real, and the result is often a slightly customised template rather than something that actually looks like your business.
So here’s the alternative process. Of course, you could just test the process instead of reading how it works.
Step 1: Start a free consultation
You go to designthissite.com and start a conversation with Maya, our AI design consultant. You can speak or type, your choice. Maya asks about your business: what you do, who you serve, what you sell. Then about your brand: do you have colours and a logo, or do you need suggestions. Then about your visual preferences: modern or traditional, bold or calm, minimal or rich. The whole conversation takes about 10 minutes and there are no forms to fill in.
Step 2: Pick from three custom design options
Based on what you told Maya, the AI generates three completely different design directions for your site. Not three colour variations of the same template, but three distinct layouts, with different typography, different section structures, and different visual personalities. You look at all three and pick the one that feels most like your business.
This is the part that’s worth being precise about. Most “AI website builders” you’ve heard of don’t actually generate designs. They take a pre-built template, ask you a few questions, and use AI to write the text inside it. Every customer ends up with a slight variation on the same five layouts. DesignThisSite generates the design itself. The AI is making the layout decisions, not just filling in someone else’s template.
Step 3: Refine the front page
Once you’ve picked a direction, Maya goes deeper. What pages do you need? What should your homepage actually say? What should each section do? You can let the AI write the content based on what you’ve told it, or paste in your own copy. By the end of this phase, you have a complete, customised front page.
Step 4: Add functionality and content for the rest of the site
Phase three is where you cover the practical stuff. Do you need a contact form? Booking system? Online shop? Multilingual support? You describe what you need, the AI configures it. Same for the content of your other pages: about, services, contact, anything else.
Step 5: Receive your complete WordPress website
The AI generates the full multi-page site. All pages, navigation, forms, mobile design, and footer. It’s a real WordPress site running on a custom-designed theme that was created for your business specifically. We handle the hosting, so you don’t need to set up anything yourself. The site is delivered the same day, ready to go live on your domain.
What you get at the end
A complete WordPress website with a custom-designed theme. Real content written for your business. Contact forms that work. Mobile-responsive design. Hosting included. And, this is the part that matters, you fully own the site and the theme. There’s no lock-in, ever. If you ever want to move it to a different host, hand it to a developer, or expand it yourself, you can. WordPress is WordPress.
Total time investment from you: about 15 minutes for the consultation, then a bit more if you want to refine things. Total cost: a fraction of what an agency would charge, with hosting included on most plans. See current pricing for exact figures.
Which route should you actually take?
We’re obviously biased, so here’s the genuinely honest version.
Make your WordPress website yourself if: you enjoy learning new software, you have plenty of time, your website doesn’t need to look particularly polished, and you want to understand WordPress deeply for the long term. DIY is also a good fit if you have very specific design ideas you want to execute personally.
Hire a freelancer or agency if: you need custom features that go beyond standard small business needs, your website is mission-critical (high-volume ecommerce, regulated industries, complex integrations), and you have a budget of €3,000–10,000+. Even in this case, you can start of with AI service and hire an agency when you hit a wall.
Use an AI service like DesignThisSite if: you want a custom-designed WordPress site without spending 30+ hours learning the platform, you’d rather describe your business in 15 minutes than fight with theme settings for two weekends, and you want a result that looks like your business, not like the theme demo you started from.
The thing nobody mentions in “how to make a WordPress website” tutorials is that the traditional process is optimised for people who want to learn WordPress. If that’s not actually your goal, if your goal is to have a website so you can get back to running your business, then doing it yourself is solving the wrong problem.
Common questions about making a WordPress website
Do I need to know how to code?
No. WordPress doesn’t require coding for most things. But the design and customisation layer is still a learning curve, and “no code” doesn’t mean “no time investment”.
How long does it really take?
Honestly, two to four weeks of evening and weekend work for a beginner doing it themselves. About 15 minutes plus a bit of refinement with an AI service. A few weeks to a few months with a freelancer or agency.
Can I move my WordPress site later?
Yes, that’s one of the biggest advantages of WordPress over Wix or Squarespace. Whether you build it yourself, hire someone, or use DesignThisSite, the site is yours. You can move it to any host that supports WordPress.
What about Wix or Squarespace? Aren’t they easier?
They’re easier to start. They’re harder to leave. With WordPress, you own the site. With Wix or Squarespace, you’re renting a website on their platform. If you want to move, you start over from scratch. For a hobby site, that’s fine. For a business that you expect to still be running in five years, owning matters.
Will an AI-built site look generic?
Not if the AI is generating the design, which is what DesignThisSite does. It will look generic if the “AI builder” you use is just pasting your text into a pre-made template, which is how most of them work. The test is whether you get distinctly different design options or just colour variations of the same layout.
Try the 15-minute version first
If the DIY route sounds like a lot of work, and it is, you can try the free consultation before you commit to anything. It takes about 15 minutes, you’ll see three custom design options for your business, and there’s no payment until you actually love what you see.
If you’d like to read more about how the process works, the how it works page walks through all four phases in detail. And if you want to compare this against the other routes in more depth, our complete guide to WordPress website design covers the five main ways to get a site built, with honest pros and cons for each.
