Prerequisites
- You must have registered a domain name as described in Module 3, Lesson2.
- You must have signed up with a web host as described in Module 4, Lesson 3.
I'm going to assume that you used my recommended domain name registrar Namecheap and my recommended web host SiteGround. If not, you'll need to modify your process accordingly.
Sign in to Your Web Host
This is just to obtain your web host's domain name servers.
If you already know these, you can skip this step.
Otherwise, log in as described in the previous lesson.
Then click on Websites, select your website and click on the Site Tools button.
This will bring up a screen that shows you the name servers you need to use for this site.
Make a note of these. In the above example, they are ns1.siteground.net and ns2.siteground.net. It's vital that you get these exactly right.
You can log out now.
Sign in to Your Domain Name Registrar
Sign in to your domain name registrar using the credentials you set up when you registered your domain name. Namecheap is used as the example here, so you would go to namecheap.com and select the login option.
Enter your credentials and click the Sign in and Continue button.
Then click on Domain List (though you'll probably only have one at this stage).
Go to the relevant domain (goldilockscoffee.com in this case) and click the Manage button.
Part way down the next screen, look for the heading Nameservers and click on the drop-down arrow.
From the options offered by the drop-down, select Custom DNS and then enter the two nameservers that you saved earlier.
Then click on the green tick to save them.
No other action is required.
Except to wait.
You can log off now.
How Long to Wait
This is a little unpredictable, as it depends on several factors, including where you are in the world and how busy the internet is at the moment.
The process is called propagation and it can often take around 24 hours before your site is associated with its domain name.
You can check simply by entering your site's url (https://goldilockscoffee.com in this case or, more simply just goldilockscoffee.com) and seeing what comes up.
Here's one example, a site under construction screen from SiteGround. This is what you would see while the website has been created at SiteGround but DNS propagation from Namecheap is still taking place.
Some hours later, entering goldilockscoffee.com into a search engine produced this result:
Don't worry that this looks nothing like the website you have in mind.
(And in fact it might look quite different from the image above).
Everything is working fine.
You now have a new website, based on the WordPress platform and hosted on the internet. It has been created using a default theme, page and post.
It's like a blank canvas waiting for you to turn it into a masterpiece.
Let's do that in the next lesson.
Outcomes
At the end of this lesson, you have pointed your domain name at your site's web host and, once you've waited for propagation to occur, you can find your new site by entering its domain name into a search engine such as Google, Bing or Safari.
Your site doesn't look like anything much yet, but it exists and can be found, which are huge steps forward.
We'll start to cover enhancing your site in the next two lessons.