Starting WordPress Sites on SiteGround Just Got Easier

You can build just about anything using WordPress. With thousands of themes and plugins, anyone can access the features and functionalities they need to achieve their goals. But for a person just starting out, all the options can be overwhelming. Rather than be a source of inspiration, the choices can become a blocker to launching that brand new site.

To solve this problem, we’ve developed a WordPress Starter plugin that takes the confusion out of building a new WordPress site. Our plugin walks you through a curated number of themes and the most common site features so you can choose exactly what you need and launch your website more quickly.

Get a Feature-Rich Site Right Out of the Box

When you build a WordPress site with SiteGround, our system installs a fresh WordPress site with the default Twenty Seventeen theme. Until today, our guided setup stopped there.

Now, all new WordPress installations on SiteGround come with our WordPress Starter plugin, which takes the user experience one big step further. When you log into a new WordPress admin for the first time, you will be guided through a short site-building process that includes selecting a theme with demo content and adding basic website functionalities.

Once you’ve made your selections, all your choices will get installed and you’ll have a fully-functional site — right out of the box. Then you can start customising it with your content and media.

Everything Starts With the Right Design

The first step in the WordPress Starter process is choosing a great theme, the foundation of your site’s look. When installing a new theme, however, many beginners struggle to achieve the same look as the demo site. That’s why we’re giving customers a jump start on customising their theme with easy-to-edit placeholder content. The pre-populated content makes building pages more intuitive so you use the theme to its full potential.

Choose from a curated list of exceptional pre-populated themes organised by category and industry. OceanWP specifically designed these themes for SiteGround and our clients can take full advantage of the handy time-saving demo images and content.

The demo content on OceanWP is built with the free version of Elementor page builder, which many website owners consider to be the easiest page builder plugin for WordPress. We install the free version of the Elementor page builder plugin by default for everyone unless you choose to opt out.

Adding Function to Form

The next step is adding functional features to your site such as contact forms, calendars, an online shop, SEO, and other essential marketing tools.

If the functionality is already built into the theme or the demo content, we won’t ask again if you want to add it. For example, we’ll assume if you’ve chosen a portfolio theme, you want the gallery feature. Our goal is to limit the number of decisions in the website-building process, so you can focus on precisely what you need.

Using the WordPress Starter can also save you the task of searching for and evaluating plugins. We’ve hand-picked the best plugins for the most common website needs based on our knowledge and experience.

We’ve partnered with some of the most popular, easy-to-use, and highly-rated plugins to offer an even more seamless experience to our customers. Choose from WPForms, FooGallery, Yoast SEO, Monster Insights, The Events Calendar, Optin Monster, WP Google Maps, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. We’re grateful for their cooperation in the development process.

A Custom Dashboard

Although the default WordPress dashboard is quite flexible and customizable, it can quickly get cluttered by theme and plugin notices, advertisement, and other information. That’s why we’ve decided to replace the default dashboard with a simple screen that will help a beginner quickly navigate to content editing or to the settings of any installed plugin.

The Power of REACT

Our WordPress Starter plugin runs really fast thanks to the top Javascript libraries we used for interface design: REACT.  We love the performance and the “application feel” it provides to the user so we decided to use it for the installation interface and for our next WordPress projects!

Ready to test the WP Starter yourself? Start a fresh WordPress installation through your User Area and log into the WordPress admin. We would love to get your feedback on the new experience. Please use the comment form to give us your feedback! All suggestions are more than welcome as we aim to continue developing that starter process and make it even more useful for beginners.

Have your own setup workflow? No problem! You can easily exit the new Starter experience and revert to the standard WordPress dashboard through the links at the bottom of our interfaces.