A step-by-step guide to starting a news website.
Step 1: Get a Domain Name
Every website needs a domain name. It’s a no-brainer.
Come up with a unique yet easy-to-remember name for your news website.
Use a business name generator to get ideas.
Get a domain name with a popular extension like .com or .co.uk, something that looks professional and easy to remember.
Avoid .online or .xyz; these extensions are cheap but can look suspicious because shady sites often use them.
Step 2 – Choose a Web Hosting Plan.
To host your news website, choose a web hosting plan with enough storage for media content.
Choose a plan with at least 20 GB of storage.
I highly recommend Hostinger and Bluehost; both offer affordable web hosting plans.
Step 3 – Installing CMS
To manage your news website, you need a content management system.
WordPress is a great open-source CMS and perfect for beginners.
WordPress has a ton of extensions, including dedicated plugins specifically made for news websites.
Install WordPress on your web hosting server.
Make sure you have the essential plugins installed and activated.
Recommended Plugin List
BBQ Firewall: This plugin protects your site from a wide range of threats and automated cyberattacks. It’s a must-have plugin.
Rank Math SEO (or Yoast): This plugin is super user-friendly for optimising your news articles for search engines like Google and Bing.
Smush: Smush automatically compresses images in your news articles and featured images, improving page load speed with lazy-loading attributes.
FYI: In simple terms, lazy loading is a technique that delays images and videos from loading until the user scrolls down to view them.
Wordfence Security: Last but not least, Wordfence Security is an all-in-one plugin that protects your site from Hackers and bots. It offers several features to harden your site security.
If you use Wordfence, consider uninstalling the BBQ Firewall, since Wordfence includes a firewall.
Recommended Themes
Newspaper (by tagDiv): The absolute gold standard and best-selling theme for news websites. It includes a custom front-end page builder, built-in review systems, paywall integrations, and hundreds of one-click starter templates.
Jannah: A fantastic alternative to Newspaper. It is highly optimised for speed and includes built-in web push notifications, AMP support, and beautiful mobile layouts.
Publisher: Known for handling heavy content loads well and comes with over 90 pre-designed templates specifically for different news niches (sports, crypto, local news).
Now that the site is ready with essential plugins installed and themes and design being completed, the real work begins.
Step 4 – Writing News Articles
Start by writing your first news article on your news website.
You can either choose a specific niche or go with multiple niches, build categories for each niche, and list articles over time.
The niche you choose should be something you are passionate about: gaming, politics, health, finance, etc.
Before writing, do extensive research and collect images, videos, media bytes, stats and official tweets to include in your article.
Give due credit to authors/source and try to avoid using copyrighted content as much as possible.
Using extensions like Grammarly will help you find and fix errors in your writing.
Publish the article once you have finished writing.
Step 5 – Setting Up Content Delivery System
You wrote the first news article, but what’s the point if nobody reads it?
How will people find your news article?
Here comes the most important part: setting up the content delivery system.
Create a Notion page, or set up a Kanban board on Jira.
Find where your ideal audience hangs out online.
Assuming you are writing articles on politics, check out relevant subreddits like r/ukpolitics and r/uknews.
If your article is related to tech, check out r/technology.
Make a list of all relevant subreddits in your Notion page or Jira Kanban board.
Visit each subreddit and engage with people in comments before posting your news article links.
I know it’s kinda boring, but mate, you’ve got hustle.
That’s the whole point of this article: no pain, no gain. No cap.
Just spamming your links everywhere on Reddit will not help.
There are many other platforms on the internet; some popular ones are:
Twitter, now x.com
Start building your audience on X; tweeting your article link with an eye-catching image can grab attention, boost engagement, and drive more clicks.
Facebook Groups
While the reach of Facebook groups is declining, a handful of niche groups are still worth trying to reach a wider audience.
Google Publisher Centre
This is a great option to get immense exposure for your news website. When your site has at least 30-40 original articles, submit it to Google Publisher Centre.
Google will manually review your site. Once approved, your articles will be available in the Google News App and on the website for millions of users to read.
Bing News PubHub
Bing News is the direct competitor of Google News. By adding your site to Bing’s PubHub, your articles will appear on Microsoft’s browser homepage and Bing News.
Step 6 – Integrate Analytics and Ads.
Install an analytics plugin in WordPress to track site traffic.
Submit your site to AdSense or another ad network, and insert the ad code in your site header.
Using Ad plugins, you can assign ad slots for ad networks. Balance the number of ads and the text content for a better reading experience.
Earning Potential: Your monthly earnings depend on your site’s total traffic and the monetisation option you choose. Display ads usually offer a low CPM rate for news websites.
In the early days, the traffic your site receives will be low, and subscriptions and paywalled articles won’t make sense; however, as your site traffic increases, you can consider offering subscriptions and publishing exclusive articles, which will significantly boost your revenue.
Many independent news sites accept donations from readers; you can do the same with PayPal Donate and Buy Me a Coffee.
Wrapping up
I hope you understood the 6 steps that you need to follow to start and run a successful news website.
Consider offering free weekly or monthly newsletters to build an email list. An email list of dedicated readers isn’t just a traffic source; it is an asset. This will diversify your traffic sources and reduce your dependency on platforms like Google Publisher Centre.
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