Introduction
Welcome, Etsy sellers! I’m writing this article in response to the response I’ve had from Etsy sellers about my previous article on setting up a small business website from scratch. This article contains a lot of the same information, but made specific to Etsy. This article will cover how to set up a website and blog to promote your Etsy shop, starting from scratch. I will go over picking a domain name, buying web hosting, installing WordPress and putting in your pages and content. I’ll also include instructions on setting up an email account for you at your new domain.
If you already have a blog at wordpress.com which you want to move to your own domain, do steps 1 and 2 below, then follow the instructions in this tutorial.
If you already have a blog at blogspot.com which you want to move to your own domain, do steps 1 and 2 below, then follow the instructions in this tutorial.
If you follow along, by the end of the article you will have a simple website with four or five pages, links to your shops, and a blog section. Here’s an example of the kind of site I’m talking about. You’ll also have a professional-looking email address at your own domain that you can hand out. Before we get started, let’s get one thing out of the way – this is not difficult stuff. If you’re capable of creating an account on Etsy, logging in, and listing your items, then I promise that you’re more than capable of setting up a website using these instructions. I have carefully picked the hosting and software to make things as straightforward as possible. We’re going to be using WordPress to build the website, so you won’t have to type a single word of HTML. And we’re going to set up WordPress automatically, so you won’t have to move or edit any files.
The article is quite long, as I’ve tried to explain everything as fully as I can, so I suggest you bookmark it so you can read it at your leisure. I’ve included plenty of screenshots so that you can see exactly what you should be doing. For the larger screenshots which show a whole browser window, just click on them to see them full size. I suggest that you read the whole thing through before starting. If you don’t understand something, don’t worry – the steps will still work even if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing them, and you will pick it up quickly. Once you actually start, it should only take a couple of hours to get your website up and running. It might take a bit longer, of course, to fill it with great content!
Some of the links in this tutorial are affiliated links; this means that this site makes money when you buy a product or service using these links. Such links are marked with an asterisk (*). This doesn’t affect what I write, cost you anything, or change the product or service.
Step 1 – Pick a domain name and buy hosting
OK,first a couple of explanations. Hosting is just a place for you to store your data where it will be accessible to other people. A domain name is an address that people can use to view your website (like whalesharkwebsites.com).
I’ve lumped these two steps together because we’re going to be using BlueHost* for web hosting. BlueHost‘s hosting packages have two feature that are very important for us, because they let us keep things simple:
- They let you register a domain name when you sign up for hosting. This means that we can take care of our domain and our hosting all in one place, and they’ll be automatically linked. This means that we can avoid having to link our domain name to our hosting package manually, which is a step that can be quite complicated.
- When you sign up for hosting, you get a free domain name for life. This is good; not because domain name registration is expensive (it’s less than $10 per year), but because we don’t have to worry about renewing the domain name every year – this gives us one less thing to worry about.
This is the only step that will cost you money. We want to sign up for the cheapest hosting plan,which is $6.95 per month – that will be plenty,even if you get loads of traffic. But first, we have to pick a domain name that is available. The easiest way to tell if a domain name is already taken is to enter it on the Bluehost signup page*:
If the domain is already taken, then you’ll get an error message:
How to pick a domain name
The best domain name is one that includes your shop name. Your shop name is the most important bit of branding you have, and it’s also a phrase that people might use when searching for you. The good news is that most Etsy shop names are pretty unique and creative, so finding a related name that isn’t taken should be quite easy. Lets take an imaginary Etsy shop called YellowButterfly. First, let’s try the obvious one – yellowbutterfly.com (don’t worry about the www. bit). If this isn’t available, let’s try combining the shop name with a word that describes what we make, e.g.
- yellowbutterflycreations.com
- yellowbutterflydesigns.com
- yellowbutterflysculptures.com
- yellowbutterflysupplies.com
- yellowbutterflyphotography.com
You get the idea. Use your creativity and you’ll be able to come up with a great domain name that’s still available. Make sure you get one that ends in .com (the default option on the Bluehost signup page*). One more thing to bear in mind is that you will probably want to put this address on your business cards, so try to get one that’ll fit on one line! Aim for about 35 characters maximum. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you can always ask in the Etsy forums. For the rest of this article, I’ll use yourdomain.com to stand for the domain name that you chose.
Once you’ve picked your domain name, go ahead and sign up for hosting*. Make a note of your BlueHost.com username and password, because you’ll need it during the next step.You’ll be able to access your new website with or without the www. In other words, if you registered yourdomain.com, you would also be able to use www.yourdomain.com. This is all taken care of automatically by BlueHost.
Step 2 – Install WordPress
So you have a domain name and hosting, but if you go to the address that you registered, there’s nothing there. (Actually, there might be a placeholder page saying “hosted by BlueHost” or something similar.) If we were building a website manually, we would now start writing HTML code and uploading files. But instead, we’re going to do things the easy way and do all our writing inside WordPress. But first we have to install it!
Go to the BlueHost login page here, then enter your BlueHost username and password from Step 1.
You’ll see the BlueHost control panel with a loads of icons. Scroll down to the box marked Software/Services, and click on WordPress.
Click the green Install button
then make sure that the Where would you like WordPress installed box shows the domain name that you just registered.
Check the box and click Complete.
When it’s finished, the page will tell you your WordPress admin password; write that down somewhere safe.
That’s it; WordPress is now installed! If you now point your browser to the domain that you registered, you should see a basic WordPress blog with a “Hello World” post.
To log in to your WordPress, either click on the “login” link in the sidebar, or go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin (e.g. yellowbutterfly.com/wp-admin). You should see the WordPress login screen. Enter the username “admin” and enter the admin password to log in.
You should see the WordPress dashboard - a page with a whole load of info, and a menu on the left.
Step 3 – Add pages
Now we have WordPress up and running, we’re going to set up the structure of our website. Our first job is to add some pages. (NOTE: if you’re moving a blog from wordpress.com to this new domain, then switch to this tutorial now. If you’re moving a blog from blogspot.com, switch to this tutorial).
If you’ve not thought about it yet, now is the time to decide on a list of pages you want on your website. For this tutorial, I’ll assume that we want five pages in total:
Home: This will be the front page of your website. It’ll have a banner (kind of like your Etsy shop) and a short welcome message to say “Hi” to your visitors.
About: This will contain information about you – how long you’ve been crafting, what your favourite techniques and materials are, what your inspiration is, etc.
Shop: This page will contain links to your shops. One of the great things about setting up a website like this is that you have have links to as many different shops as you like. So if you have two Etsy shops, an Artfire shop and a DaWanda shop, you only have to hand out one address and your customers can find them all!
Contact: Here you’ll have a list of different ways for people to contact you. You can include an email address, a Twitter feed or whatever you like. In general, the easier it is for people to contact you, the better. If you have a bricks-and-mortar store, you can give the address here as well.
Blog: This page will contain your blog posts.
Now we’ve decided on the pages, lets add them. Click on the “Pages” link on the left of the dashboard.
You’ll see a list of all the pages that currently exist on your website.
At the moment, there’s only one – “About“. Since that page already exists, we don’t have to add it. Add another page by clicking the “Add new” button.
You’ll be taken to a form where you can set the title of your new page. Enter “Shop” for the title, and click “Publish” (don’t worry about adding content yet, we’ll do that later).
Now click on the left hand “Pages” link again, and you’ll see that you now have two pages – “About” and “Shop“.
Repeat the process to add “Home“, “Contact” and “News” (or “Blog” if you like).
Once you’ve added all the pages, click on the “My Blog” link in the top left corner of the window to view your website (or go to yourdomain.com). You should see links to all the new pages that you’ve created. There will be two links labelled “Home“, but don’t worry about that just now.
The next job is to make sure that the “Home” page is the first thing that a visitor sees. If you look at your website right now, the front page displays the recent blog posts, which is not what we want – we want the front page to be our “Home” page, and the blog posts to be on a separate page. To fix this, go back to your WordPress dashboard, scroll down and click on the “Reading” link on the left under the “Settings” heading.
Where it says “Front page displays“, check the box that says “a static page” and then use the “Front Page” drop-down box to select “Home“. Finally, use the “Posts page” drop-down box to select “News“. When you’re all done, it should look like this:
Click “Save changes“. We have told WordPress that we want the front page to be the “Home” page, and we want blog posts to be displayed on the “News” page. Now if you visit www.yourdomain.com again, you should see that it’s looking better.
The duplicate “Home” link has disappeared, and the first thing you see is the “Home” page that you created (don’t worry that there’s no content there yet; we will add it soon). If you click on the “News” link, you will see the default “Hello world” blog post (don’t worry, we’ll delete that soon). You might notice that there’s already some content on the “About” page – this is just the default text that WordPress creates for you. Let’s deal with that next.
Step 4 – Add some content
Now you’re going to fill in the blank pages you created. To edit a page, log in and click on the “Pages” link on the left hand side of the dashboard like you did when creating them. This time, when you see the list of pages, click on the title of the one you want to edit. We want to start with the “About” page, so click on the page title to edit it.
You’ll see the same screen that you saw when creating pages, with a space to edit the title and a space to edit the text of the page. Delete the existing text and write something about yourself. Just write a couple of sentences about yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect – you can go back and edit the page at any time (that’s the beauty of WordPress). When you’ve added your text, scroll down and untick the boxes under discussion – we don’t want to allow people to comment on the pages, only on our blog posts.
Why not add a picture of yourself so that visitors can see you – follow these instructions to add an image to a page. Once you’ve made the changes, click the blue “Update” button to save them. Open your blog again and click on the “About” link to see how your new page looks.
Use the same process to edit your “Home“, “Contact” and “Shop” pages. For your “Shop” page, you’ll want to include some links so people can click to get to your Etsy shop. To add links, use these instructions.
Finally, let’s get rid of that “Hello word” blog post and add something more personal. Log in, and click the “Posts” link on the left of the dashboard. Just like with the pages, you’ll see a list of blog posts.
There’s currently only one item in the list – the default “Hello World” blog post. To delete it, move the mouse cursor over the title (but don’t actually click on it). You should see a little row of links appear – click on the one that says “Trash“.
That will get rid of the “Hello World” post and leave you with a page saying “No posts found”.
Let’s add a new post; click “Add new” and the post editing screen will come up.
You’ll notice that it looks very similar to the page editing screen, and it works in the same way – give your post a title (perhaps,”New website launched!”) and write a couple of lines in the content box. You can add images or links just like you did for pages. If you scroll down you’ll see a box on the right headed “Post tags“. If you sell on Etsy, then you already know how to use tags! Click in the box, then type your tags, pressing Enter after each one. When you’re done, scroll back up to the top of the page and click the blue “Publish” button.
Add a second blog post to check you’ve got the hang of it. Why not post about the most recent item that you’ve listed on Etsy? You can add a picture of the item to the post (use the instructions above) and include a link to take readers directly to the item listing.
Once you’ve added a couple of blog posts, browse to yourdomain.com again and click on the “News” link. You’ll see your posts in reverse order – most recent first.
Step 5 – customize your website
Ok, you now have a website with a useful pages and a blog section. You know how to add and edit pages, and how to keep your blog up to date. Visitors can learn a bit about your, contact you, find all your shops, and read your latest posts. The last thing we’re going to do to our new website is customize it.
Take a look at the front page of your website. You’ll notice that across the top it says “My Blog” and “Just another WordPress site“. Let’s replace those with something more personal. Log in to your site, and click the “General” link on the left under the “Settings” heading. We need to change the first two bits of this form – “Site title” and “Tagline“.
Change the site title to something short and appropriate (for my imaginary shop, I’ll change it to simply “Yellow Butterfly“). The tagline should be a short description of what the site is about – for example, “Handmade butterfly-inspired jewellery“. Scroll down and click the “Save changes” button, then open your website front page again and see how it looks.
Finally, let’s replace the header image (the bit that currently shows a road and trees) with something more personal. From the dashboard, click the “Header” link on the left under the “Appearance” heading. Look for the bit of the page that says “Upload image” and click “Browse“.
This will open a file chooser that will let you pick an image from your computer to use as the header. Photographs of your Etsy items often work well – just remember that whichever photo you choose will have to be cropped so that it’s wide and short. Once you’ve picked an image, click “Upload” and you’ll be taken to the next page where you can choose how you want the image to be cropped. Play around with the position of the crop box until it looks good, then click “Crop and publish“. Open your website in a browser again and see how it looks with the new header.
Step 6 – Add an email account
One of the great things about having your own domain is that you can have yourname@yourdomain.com as an email address. Let’s face it, martin@yellowbutterflydesigns.com looks a lot more professional on a business card than martin789@gmail.com! Thankfully, BlueHost has tools that makes it easy for us to add an email address, so this final step won’t take too long.
Go to the BlueHost login page here, then enter your BlueHost username and password from Step 1.
From the BlueHost Control Panel, click on the “Email accounts” icon under the “Email” heading.
You’ll see the form which allows you to add a new email account. Fill in your name, and pick a password. Then click on the”Create account” button.
Once this has been done, you’ll see that the new account has been created. BlueHost has built-in webmail, so if you want, you can access your email from this page. Click the little down arrow next to “More“, then click on “Access webmail“.
However, for most people it’s more convenient to get their email forwarded to an already existing address, so let’s set that up next. Go back to the BlueHost control panel, and this time click on “Forwarders”.
On the window that comes up, click the “Add Forwarder” button
You’ll be taken to a form where you can fill in the name for the account that you just created, and the address you want the email to be forwarded to. Once you’ve filled them in, click the “Add forwarder” button.
You’ll see a confirmation message, telling you that email will be forwarded correctly.
That’s it! Try sending an email to your new address to make sure that it works properly.
Done!
Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the tutorial. You now have a customized website that you can show off to anyone who’s interested in your work, and a professional-looking email address that you can give out. There’s loads more that you can do with WordPress – you can add new features with plugins, completely change the look with different themes, and even add a shopping cart to let visitors buy your products without every leaving your website! Browse the WordPress category of my blog for more ideas.
If you’ve found any part of this tutorial confusing or unclear, please let me know, either by contacting me or leaving a comment. I want to use this article to show the Etsy community how easy it is to set up and maintain your own website, so if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, please tell me.
If you want a more sophisticated website, you might be interested in my custom WordPress installation service – take a look at my Services page for more details.
NOTE: you’ll notice that you can access your new website with or without the www. In other words, if you registered yourdomain.com, you would also be able to use www.yourdomain.com. This is all taken care of automatically by BlueHost.
Hopefully, the reason why this is important for online business is obvious – these are the people you’re trying to sell to, so make sure that they can buy from you! Do you offer shipping to the countries where most of your visitors come from? If not then you might be missing out on customers. Even if you’re not selling physical goods, but offering downloads or services, it’s still important to ensure that people can buy in their currency. Looking at my data, I can see that my second-biggest set of visitors comes from Australia, so if I was running an online shop I would want to make sure that I offered shipping to Australia, and if possible listed my prices in Australian dollars as well as American dollars.
Google Analytics divides your traffic up into “Direct”, “Referring Sites”, and “Search”. All traffic is important, but search traffic is by far the most important of the three. That’s because visitors are more likely to take action – which includes buying stuff! – when they are searching for something, rather than just browsing around. If you get search traffic for a particular keyword, then it tells you two things – firstly, that people are looking for it; secondly, that they have chosen to click on a search result for your website. In short it’s telling you, “write more articles about this keyword!” Also (and this is the only SEO tip I’m going to mention in this post), make sure your post titles include these keywords.
This page will let you know who is linking to you. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from a particular website, then it’s a good idea to go and check out what they are saying! If there’s a link from a page that’s relevant to your business, then leave a comment – this type of engagement with the community is important when blogging. Most of my referrals come from Etsy.com, unsurprisingly, and most of those are from the forums (you can click the name of a referring website to see a list of pages on that site that are linking to you).
It’s important to keep an eye on where your visitors go, especially if you’re selling your products on a different website. For example, if you have a blog, but sell your items on Etsy, then you want to make sure that as many of your visitors as possible go to your Etsy shop when they leave your blog. This page will let you check that. If you want to see which actual pages your visitors go to, then just click the name of a website in this view. If your shop is not the top result, then you need to work on making sure that more of your hard-earned blog traffic ends up in your shop.
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