How to Start a Food Critic Website in 7 Easy Steps

If you want to have a food critic blog, then you need to start with one simple thing:

You need to create it.

But the problem is many people think it’s very hard to do.

And they’re all wrong!

It’s so easy to do that…

…that you won’t believe it was so simple to create it yourself.

The question is:

How to start creating it?

Well, just follow these 7 very simple steps:

How to Create A Restaurant Review Blog

• Step 1: Get Website Hosting to Host Your Blog
• Step 2: Get a FREE Domain Name
• Step 3: Install WordPress And Setup Your Website
• Step 4: Design Your Blog
• Step 5: Install WordPress Plugins
• Step 6: Integrate an Email Newsletter
• Step 7: Add New Posts And Pages

Let’s look at each step individually.

What is The Best Website Hosting For a Restaurant Review Website?

The only hosting company I recommend for beginners is iPage.

What is a Domain Name?

When you type Google.com (or markinblog.com) into your browser in order to visit a site, that’s the website’s domain name.

In a nutshell, a domain name is like your address. It tells people (and web browsers) where to find your site.

When you buy an affordable domain name, you get to choose exactly what you want it to be as long as it’s available.

That way, it’ll look like this:

yoursitename.com

How Much Does a Domain Name Cost?

Usually, domain names cost somewhere around $7-$15.

But I’ll show you how to get it for FREE…

How to Get a FREE Domain Name?

Unlike many of the more profit-centric web hosts that will charge you upwards of $14.99/year for a new domain, iPage gives new customers a FREE domain name for the entire first year of their web hosting service.

That means you won’t need to pay anything for it if you’ll buy their web hosting services!

What a great advantage. Isn’t it?

Everything that you have to do is buy iPage hosting.

Here’s a simple process on how to buy web hosting on iPage and claim your FREE domain name:

Step 1: click the link below:

Step 2: click on the “Get Started Now” button in the opened window:

Step 3: Check if your chosen domain name is available.

Step 4: Select term length

Note: the longer term you’ll take the cheaper price (per month) will be.

Step 5: Check for website essentials.

You can skip over all of the Website Essentials upsells on the package information page.

There is no need to buy any of the extra things they offer you.

Just skip over all of this and click  Checkout.

Step 6: Complete billing information

Step 7: Complete the payment and wait for approval.

Once you have filled out that form you’ll then need to wait for iPage to send you the login information.

Just click this link and follow the instructions to set up your hosting account.

How to Install WordPress Website?

Once you’ve completed the registration process, it’s time to install your WordPress blog.

Here’s a simple process on how to install WordPress website on iPage hosting control panel:

Step 1: Login to the iPage Hosting control panel

Step 2: Click on the WordPress 1-Click install icon.

Step 3: Select the domain that you want to install WordPress on.

Here you just need to pick the domain that you chose earlier.

Step 4: Fill the site details.

Here you’ll also need to give your site a Title, provide username and password credentials.

These will be used to login to WordPress when it is installed.

You can create it your own or use the suggested ones.

When you’re done providing credentials, click on ‘ Next’ and let the setup process take place.

Step 5: Congratulations! Your WordPress website is successfully installed

Once the install is completed, you’ll then see this screen:

Now you can go to your newly installed website and you should see something like this:

It’s time to log in to your website.

Click the green button and you should see the following screen:

Note: more often than not, you’ll be able to login to WordPress by entering ‘/wp-admin’ after your URL-

yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Enter in the login credentials that you either created or were given earlier.

Here’s what you should see after logging in:

Now you need to deactivate all the unnecessary plugins.

To do so, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and follow the instructions below:

Now that you’ve launched your website, you’ll be able to see – what can only be described as – a skeleton of a website.

And this is where it gets fun.

With your domain name, web hosting, and blog setup, it’s time to get down and dirty and start customizing the aesthetic of your website.

In the next step, we’ll learn how to design your blog and make it look beautiful.

Pick a Restaurant Review Theme

Now that you’ve got the nuts and bolts of learning how to start a restaurant review blog, it’s time to turn this blank canvas into a work of art.

The first place to start is with your blog theme.

You can think of a theme as the template for the visual layout of your blog.

If you’re not a web developer (and I’m definitely not one), having a good theme makes design and organization of your site look beautiful.

A nice theme and design for your blog are one of the best (relatively inexpensive) investments you can make early on as you’re trying to attract more readers.

However, I know it can be difficult to just know what kind of design you want for your blog — especially as you’re just learning how to start a blog in the first place.

So, I created some of the best WordPress theme recommendations for you.

Note: usually WordPress theme will cost you anywhere between $19 and $60 (one-time fee). However, this is a small price considering that you’ll be getting an already ready-to-use design.

Best WordPress Themes For a Restaurant Review Blog

Here are some of the themes that I recommend you to use for your newly created WordPress blog.

Of course, you can choose the other ones.

But I think these ones are very powerful themes that will fit all your needs.

Didn’t like any of those WordPress themes?

Then you can search for the most suitable one from hundreds of themes on the Theme Forest marketplace:

Buy a WordPress Theme

Once you’ll find a suitable theme then follow all the instructions on how to buy it and make a purchase.

In the next step, I’ll show you how to install a WordPress theme.

How to Install WordPress Theme

Note: In the following example we’ll be using a NewsPaper theme from the ThemeForest.net. The overall process might be a bit different if you’ll choose another theme. However, all the steps will be very similar.

Step 1: Download Your Theme Files

Login to your ThemeForest.net account and look for your username at the top right bar.

Then click on the green “Download” button and “Installable WordPress file only”.

Step 2: Upload the theme.

Once you download the files you will need to upload them to your new WordPress site.

Go to Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload Theme, choose the .zip file you just downloaded and click “Install Now”.

You should see the following success message:

Click “Activate”.

You should see your Theme’s welcome message now (it might be different if you’ll be using another theme):

Congratulations! You have successfully installed your theme and now are ready to customize it according to your needs.

Note: Usually WordPress themes come with documentation on how to use it (you should find it on Theme’s setup panel), so always read it on how to setup it properly.

Top WordPress Plugins For A Restaurant Review Blog

There are plenty of handy plugins in the WordPress framework which reduce lots of work on your part.

The official plugin repository has over 54,000 WordPress plugins and counting.

That means there are plugins for almost every function or feature you need on your website.

To make it easier for you I have picked up the most essential plugins that I think every blog owner need to have.

1. Thrive Leads – Your all-in-one email list building tool. Create and freely design every type of opt-in form, run A/B tests and grow your list faster than ever before.

2. Thrive Landing Pages – Usually, it is quite complicated to build landing pages with most of the WordPress themes. With Thrive Landing Pages you’ll be able to instantly publish beautiful, conversion optimized and 100% editable opt-in pages, sales pages, webinar registrations pages and countless other landing pages on your site.

3. Thrive Comments – With this plugin you’ll gain the power to spur faster feedback and increase engagement through several innovative features like upvoting and downvoting, gamified comment incentives and an impressive number of after-comment-actions.

4. Yoast SEO – With this plugin will help to add a few more valuable SEO tweaks, and on top of this, you get to learn how to use SEO in your actual articles in a completely painless way and for free!

5. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP) – This Google Analytics for WordPress plugin enables you to track your site using the latest Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to view key Google Analytics stats in your WordPress install.

6. WP Limit Login Attempts – Protect your site from brute force attacks. Brute Force Attack aims at being the simplest kind of method to gain access to a site: it tries usernames and passwords, over and over again, until it gets in. WP Limit Login Attempts plugin limit rate of login attempts and block IP temporarily.

How to Install WordPress Plugins?

There are two ways to install WordPress plugins.

One is directly from their free plugin repository and the second one when you upload and install it manually (usually used when you need to install paid WordPress plugins).

Let’s take a look at each method separately.

OPTION #1: How to install a plugin from the WordPress repository?

Step 1: Go to Dashboard > Plugins > Add new and search for the most popular plugins.

Step 2: Click the “Install Now” button.

Step 3: Click the “Activate” button.

The plugin is successfully installed.

If everything went successfully you should be redirected to the installed plugins area and get the message that the plugin has been activated.

OPTION #2: How to upload and install the plugin manually?

Another option to installing a WordPress plugin is when you upload it manually to your WordPress blog.

To do so, just follow these steps:

Step 1: Download the .zip file of your chosen plugin.

Step 2: Go to Dashboard > Plugins > Add new, upload the file you have just downloaded and click “Install Now”.

Step 3: Activate the plugin.

The plugin is successfully installed.

If everything went successfully you should be redirected to the installed plugins area and get the message that the plugin has been activated.

In the next step, we’ll learn how to integrate an email newsletter.

To start building an email list with your website is very easy.

Because it has all the tools already prepared, so you don’t need any advanced knowledge for that.

To start with you just need to have two tools:

To add a new blog post, click the “Posts” section on the left-hand side menu, then click on “Add New”.

To add a new page, click the “Pages” section on the left-hand side menu, then click on “Add New”.

On the next screen, you’ll see something like this:

You can add the title to your blog post in the top field, and your content goes in the big text box below the title.

You can save your draft or publish your content live by using the box menu on the far right of the page. You can even schedule the post to be published later – or make the post private so only friends can see it.

Once published, your new post can be found in the “All Posts” section of the “Posts” tab so you can edit it anytime.

That’s it.

Happy posting!

FAQ: