How I Set Up Bluehost, WordPress, and My Theme

Bakery Business, Creative Business Tools + Growth

When I decided to finally start my blog, the technical side felt overwhelming at first. I’m not a professional web designer or tech expert — I’m just a girl who owns a bakery and wanted a beautiful space online to share my story.

If you’ve been dreaming about starting a blog but keep putting it off because it feels too complicated, I get it. That’s exactly how I felt too. But once I sat down and broke it into steps, I realized it was actually much easier than I thought.

So today, I’m walking you through the basics of how I set up my blog with Bluehost, WordPress, and my theme. Nothing fancy, nothing overwhelming — just the steps I took, in real life, to get my site up and running.

Step 1: Choosing Bluehost for Hosting

After looking at a few different options, I went with Bluehost for my hosting. I liked that they offered a free domain for the first year, their plans are affordable, and they include one-click WordPress installation (perfect if you don’t want to deal with coding).

Here’s what I did:

  • I went to bluehost.com and under WordPress, clicked WordPress Hosting.
  • I chose the Starter Plan, which is plenty for a new blog.
  • During sign-up, Bluehost helped me set up my domain name right away.

👉 Tip: Choose a domain name that’s easy to remember and matches your brand’s vibe. Mine is heymodernbaker.com — a spinoff of my bakery, The Modern Bakery — and I love how simple and welcoming it feels.

Step 2: Installing WordPress

Once I purchased my hosting with the WordPress option, Bluehost automatically installed WordPress for me — and honestly, it felt like magic.

From your Bluehost dashboard, you’ll see a “My Sites” section. That’s where you can launch WordPress in just a few minutes. After that, you’ll be able to log into your brand-new WordPress dashboard.

👉 Tip: Bookmark your WordPress login page (it usually looks like www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin) so you don’t lose track of it.

Step 3: Setting My Site to “Coming Soon”

Before I started customizing anything, I didn’t want people stumbling across my site while it was still half-finished. So I turned on a Coming Soon page.

Bluehost actually has a built-in Coming Soon option that you can toggle on while you’re working. You can also use a free WordPress plugin (like SeedProd) if you want a fancier design, but I just used the basic option.

👉 Why I Recommend This: It takes the pressure off knowing no one will see your site until you’re ready — but you can still log in, design, and make edits behind the scenes.

Step 4: Picking and Installing My Theme

WordPress comes with a default theme, but it’s very basic. You can absolutely edit a free theme, but I was eager to launch and wanted a design that already matched the look I had in mind.

Here’s what I did:

  • I searched “WordPress themes feminine” on Google.
  • After scrolling through, I discovered 17th Avenue Designs and instantly fell in love with their soft, airy, feminine vibe.
  • I purchased the Savannah Theme, which runs on the Kadence parent theme.

A few reasons I chose a premium theme:

  • The demo site came fully set up — I just had to replace their demo content with mine.
  • It included widgets like a Shop the Post section (perfect for affiliate links in the future) and a Recipe Card feature (great for when I share recipes).
  • Their tutorials walked me through every step, so I didn’t feel lost. *Don’t skip reviewing tutorials, there are some steps suggested before uploading the theme to your site.

Installing was easy:

  1. Download the theme files from 17th Avenue.
  2. In WordPress, go to Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload Theme.
  3. Upload the ZIP file, click Install, then Activate.

👉 Tip: Choose to install the demo content so your site looks polished right away, then swap in your own content over time.

Step 5: Customizing the Basics

This is the part where your site starts to feel like “you.” Under Appearance > Customize, you can make changes that show up across your whole site.

Here’s what I started with:

  • Logo: I created mine in Canva and uploaded it under the Site Identity tab.
  • Colors + Fonts: I set a soft, airy palette that matched my brand (ChatGPT actually helped me narrow down the colors I had in mind).
  • Header: I added my navigation menu and linked my social media icons so they’d appear on every page.
  • Footer: I included my copyright line and a space for a future newsletter signup.

👉 Note: Customizing is different from editing a page.

  • Customizing = sets your site-wide style (header, footer, fonts, colors).
  • Editing a page = changes the content on a single page (like your About page).

Once those basics were in place, my blog finally started to feel like home.

Final Thoughts

If you take one thing away from this post, let it be this: you don’t have to be a professional blogger or web designer to create a blog you’re proud of. I’m figuring it out as I go, and if I can set up a site that feels like me, you can too.

These steps — hosting, WordPress, a theme you love, a Coming Soon page, and a little customization — are all you need to get started. You can always refine and add more later (and I’ll share those steps in future posts).

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