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Have you ever thought about starting a home blog? Today I wanted to talk a little bit about how you could start a home décor blog of your own, the steps involved and some tips and advice for choosing a name.

How To Start A Home Décor Blog In 5 Easy Steps

Why Start A Home Décor Blog?

If you love home décor then starting a home décor blog is a great way to express your ideas and keep a record of the projects you’ve worked on.

It can be a place to document your journey, inspire others or even be the start of a home décor based business.

Many people with popular social media channels choose to run a blog or website alongside them. This is because with social media, such as Instagram and Facebook, your content could easily disappear overnight should the platform go down.

With a blog or website you have much more control and as long as you have a reliable host and take regular back ups, your content will always be there.

It can also be another way to connect with your audience. Imagine you have a popular Instagram page with over 10,000+ followers.

What if Instagram were to disappear overnight?

What if they closed or suspended your account?

I know several people this has happened to.

Starting a home blog means you curate an email list, so should anything happen to your social media, you have a way to contact people and share your latest updates or new account details if you end up needing to start from scratch.

Also, I should add, even if you’re thinking of starting a blog that isn’t home themed, these steps still explain what you’ll need to do.

How To Start A Home Décor Blog

You may think starting a website sounds complicated or difficult. I’m going to be honest and say I did find things tough in the beginning. But, here I am six websites later.

If you’re worried about not having enough things to write about then make a list of all your ideas. You could go through each room in your home and make a list of the projects and ideas you want to include on your new home blog.

1. Choose A Name For Your Home Decor Blog

First of all, you’ll need to choose in name. This could be something that ties in with social media that you already have or something new entirely.

Picking a good name is one of the most difficult things when it comes to blogging. You may find the name you use for your socials is already taken by another website.

For the sake of branding, I like my blogs to all have the same name, website address (also known as domain name) and social media accounts.

An easy way to check if a name is being used is by putting it into Namecheckr.com. If your name is more than 15 characters long it will show as unavailable on Twitter (X) as that is the maximum character limit there, you’ll just need to come up with a short version.

If the domain name you want is taken, it can be very tempting to add a ‘the’ to the front of it or to buy a domain with a different ending such as .uk instead of .co.uk or .com.

My advice is NOT to do this. It could make it more difficult for your blog to rank in Google searches if there is an established website with a very similar name. It could also confuse social media.

You’ll also want to check whether the name you plan to use is trademarked in your country.

In the U.K. you can do that here.

If you use a trademarked name, you can be legally asked to stop using it, so always check, even if the website name and socials aren’t currently being used.

Here are a few more tips for choosing a blog name:

• Try to avoid using hyphens or number characters.
• Don’t use misspelled words or anything that is difficult to spell.
• Say the name out loud to see how it sounds. Imagine saying it on the phone. Would you need to explain or spell out any part of it?
• Using your own name is good but check there aren’t any Celebs or Porn Stars with a very similar name.
• Think about how Google will see your website. If you write about home decor then you could try having the words house or home in the title so it’s easy to see what your blog’s theme is.
• Avoid too many short common words like it, at, the, etc. I’d also avoid using the word blog.
• Buy the .com and the .co.uk version if you can. For both it should cost around £20.

2. Choose A Web Hosting Company

Next, you’ll need a choose a platform and web host.

Some platforms, such as Blogger and WordPress.com are free. Others, like wordpress.org, come with fees.

You’ll find choosing a paid option gives you a lot more choice and flexibility when it comes to the design of your blog.

Here is a quick guide to WordPress.org vs WordPress.com

Choosing to host your own blog, rather than using a free one is known as being ‘self hosted’. This is the best option if you’re planning to blog long-term and want flexibility and the ability to be able to make money eventually.

Do not use the WordPress paid hosting plan.

There are lots of hosts to choose from, many of which you may have heard of, such as Go Daddy and Siteground.

While these do offer a very cheap start-up cost they often hugely increase the cost for your second year of hosting.

I’m talking an increase of 90%.

To get a cheaper deal, you need to switch to a different provider which can be a scary prospect if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I also found with both of these web hosts that the tech support was crap. For a newbie with no clue what they are doing their help was non-existent.

My recommendation for blog hosting is Lyrical Host.

The basic package for one website is £13.99 a month which may sound like a lot BUT even if you’re a hobby blogger its the equivalent of a nice bottle of wine or a cinema trip.

The best thing about Lyrical Host is that the hosting is managed, which means they help with all aspects of setting up your blog, installing themes and any other problems you have further along the line.

This is well worth paying a little bit extra a month for and personally I love that I’m supporting a small family-run business rather than a big multi-million pound company.

Plus, at Lyrical Host the prices never go up, you can pay monthly and they are designed for bloggers and small businesses.

They also plant trees to offset your website’s carbon emissions, support charities and have loads of helpful and free resources on their website and send you free stock images each month. For a discount on your hosting use the code HAWKESHOME10 for 10% off your first month or year.

You can also buy domain names through Lyrical Host.

3. Choose A Blog Theme

Once your blog is set up (more on how to do that in a minute!) you’ll need to choose a theme which is how your blog will look. WordPress has lots of free themes pre-installed but if you’re looking for specific functionality you might want to consider a paid theme.

Then it’s time to get writing! You may also want to design a logo to add to your blog, some which can be done easily in the free online tool Canva.

If you’re into home décor then I imagine you may well already have a good grasp of putting colours together, but I do find having a clear colour pallet in mind from the start can be helpful.

What Happens Next?

Once you’ve chosen your blog name, purchased the domain name and paid for hosting, it’s simply a case of putting the three together and building your website.

The most popular choice for doing this is through wordpress.org and your host should be able to help if you get stuck.

If you’ve chosen to go with Lyrical Host then they’ll do this for you.

4. Start Writing Content

When you first take a look at your new blog it can look a bit plain.

Don’t worry.

Once you start getting posts up it will look much better.

Play around with themes, menus and other customizations and just really start to get a feel for WordPress and how it all works.

As I mentioned before, it is a learning curve but can be a lot of fun too.

Once your blog is up and running initially I would say your main goal should be getting lots of content live.

There are other aspects to blogging, such as Search Engine Social Optimization, email lists and social media but these can all wait until you’ve found your feet.

5. Set Up Your Social Media

Finally, start setting up your social media account and sharing your blog content. Engaging with other bloggers in your niche can help you to build an audience and attract new followers.

I’m always happy to help so if this is something you’ve been thinking about doing and you have any questions, you can always get in touch with me.