To make your own website you will require a domain and you should choose a good web host and some software to power your website.

Hosting – I recommend using WordPress hosted at Fastcomet. If you want hosting in Canada or France I highly recommend checking out PlanetHoster

Domains – I’ve been using NameSilo lately. They have free whois privacy protection and competitive pricing.

Theme – I also recommend an amazing WordPress theme called Pro which comes with a simple to use visual page builder and a lot of premium plugins you would otherwise spend a lot of money to get.

Another great theme is Divi which I can even install for you if you’ve ordered services from me before so you don’t have to buy it.

Security – I recommend using WordFence to secure your site from hackers. If you want some help setting it up feel free to contact me. There is a free version you can install from within WordPress like any other plugin as well as a premium version you can order at their site that protects from more attacks and has some extra security features.

SEO – For SEO I’ve discovered The SEO Framework plugin which is quick and simple and seems to work better than others I’ve tried.

Anti-spam – I used to recommend WP-SpamShield but it seems to have disappeared so here are some free alternatives that might work ok.
Antispam Bee – This plugin is simple and does the trick nicely for blocking spam posts without any external services or setup and has no CAPTCHA.
Stop Spammers – This plugin will work out of the box but if you take some time to setup everything it will work even better by using many different services and techniques to stop spam registrations and form submissions.

Backups – If you don’t have anything to automate your backups you should be sure to manually back your site up from time to time or risk losing everything. For automating backups I recommend using UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore which can even send your backups off server, for example to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Note that if you’ve signed up for my recommended host then they will back up your site automatically for you each day and keep a weeks worth of backups that you can restore any time. It’s always good to have your own backups though, just in case.

Caching – Another thing you may want to do is setup a caching plugin. Keep in mind that you may have to exclude certain pages from being cached such as login pages, or other pages. Especially if those pages change from user to user. Be sure to check documentation for your plugins to see. There are many good caching plugins out there. For free caching plugins for WordPress if you want a simple one from Automattic, the creators of WordPress, WP Super Cache. Or if you want more functionality you can try something like W3 Total Cache.

I highly recommend using WP Rocket and also their RocketCDN which you can sign up for once you install WP Rocket and also their Imagify plugin for compressing images and you can even use this with Cloudflare and have WP Rocket configure it automatically for you.

If you have PlanetHoster you may not require caching plugins since it has built in LiteSpeed technology.

BTW, if you use PlanetHoster for your hosting you can get 10% off all new orders with promo code: PHA-servercode

There are plenty of other amazing plugins out there to discover. Feel free to post your favourite plugins or setup in the comments below.