Getting Started

🌱

Get started on the indieweb by connecting with the IndieWeb community, getting a personal domain, a place for your content, and setting up your home page and other IndieWeb essentials.

Do the reasons why resonate with you, but you are not sure how to get on the IndieWeb?

You have found the right page!

With each step below, you will gain understanding and more ownership of your online identity & content, steadily making progress with your personal web presence.

At some point along the way, you may want to participate the community by joining 👥 our chat room, attending a 📅 Homebrew Website Club meetup, or going to the next 🎪 IndieWebCamp weekend.

Get Your Own Site

This is the key to being on and a part of the IndieWeb:

• Get your own domain
• Set up your hosting
• Create your pages

Get Your Domain

You need your own personal domain to use as your primary online identity:

• Get your own personal domain name from a domain name registrar
• Choose your privacy level - Most domain name registrars will make your personal information publicly available (name, mailing address, phone number, email address), but many registrars offer domain privacy options, so that instead of your personal details the registrar's details will be in the public whois directory. Only use domain privacy options if you fully trust the provider of the service, since disputes about domain name administration or transfers may get tricky if you are not listed as the legal owner of the domain.

Set Up Hosting

Web hosting is how you put your website online. You can use a web hosting service, which is recommended for beginners, or you can self host on your own device, which is generally considered more challenging.

Examples of web host services:

• GitHub Pages
• GitLab Pages
• DreamHost
• NeoCities
• Netlify
• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

Create Your Pages

The actual pages or content of your website can be created in a variety of ways. Some popular options are the use of static site generators (SSGs), writing HTML, or using a Content Management Service (CMS). For blogging, you can also look at Dreamwidth, Micro.blog (Tutorial), or Blogger (Tutorial).

Optionally, you may want to import your content from other accounts or platforms. For more information, see Export: Silos or the wiki pages for specific sites, such as Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook.

Syndicate Elsewhere

Main article: POSSE

Syndication or cross-posting means to share your posts across multiple sites. You may want to set up automatic syndication so that material posted to your site is automatically distributed to your social media accounts, or you can cross-post manually.

Putting material on your own site first and linking to it elsewhere is called POSSE, which is short for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. By setting up POSSE, you can have your posts pushed to specific social media silos with a personal permalink back to the original on your own site. In other words, you allow those that read content on those silos to continue seeing what you have to say, while you retain ownership and control of your content on your own site.

Use Microformats

When setting up your home page (index.html), you can include rel-me links to your social network profiles in order to confirm those accounts are yours. If your links are set up correctly (test with the IndieWebify.Me Web Sign In Validator), this will also allow you to sign in to sites that support IndieAuth — like this wiki! For more information, see setup web sign-in.

On blogposts and articles, you can add the h-entry microformat markup to your posts in order to help automated tools display your author information, which can be useful for indie web comments, likes, reposts, and reply-context. You can use the h-entry validator to verify that your h-entry has been set up correctly.

Use Tools

🔧 Indiewebify.me provides step-by-step guidance and tools to test & validate your progress. See Tools for more useful things for building & debugging an IndieWeb site.

Join The Community

• Share what you did / discovered in the process of building your IndieWeb site, even if it is only a single page, with a simple design.
• Ask what you can/should do next in the discussion channels.
• Check the list of events and join us at the next IndieWebCamp or Homebrew Website Club meetup!
• Once you can use IndieAuth or log into the wiki, create your user page by wikifying yourself.
• Document what you've done and add your site and details to the IndieWeb examples section of relevant pages to share what and how you've done it with others.

Articles and Blog Posts

Blog posts and articles about one or more aspects getting started with a personal website. Most recent first.

• 2025-11-17 How to Make a Website in 5 Minutes by Stefan Bohacek
• 2025-06-01 You Can Make A Website by Coyote
• 2020-02-23 Jean MacDonald: Getting Started With The IndieWeb (archived)
• 2017-08-31 Build a fast, secured and free static site in less than 3 hours
• 2015-02-03 Chinese ICP Licensing: What, Why and How to Get Hosted in China

Brainstorming

This section is for collecting various ideas and proposals for improving this page, and seeing which gather sufficient "+1" support from the community make some incremental improvements.

• Proposal: Consider re-organizing top level into:
  • Get on the IndieWeb
  • How will my friends see my posts?
  • How will I see posts by my friends?
  • +1 Tantek Çelik
  • +1/0/-1 Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Resolved

• Proposal: Split "IndieWeb self-starters" into two sections on "CMS hobbyists" and "Web Developers" because "self-starter" still implies too much ease of entry/use
  • +1 Tantek Çelik

• Criticism / challenges of using/publishing tutorials as a method of helping beginners get started: tutorials go out of date without people actively maintaining them, and then can frustrate or at least disillusion or new folks trying them: https://mastodon.social/@SteveDuncan/113217240463741345 (WordPress in particular)
  • "Just to make it more fun, I decided to pursue the AWS instructions on the Indieweb site. They are out of date. After googling a bit, turns out Amazon has yet another product called Lightsail that allows for a pretty rapid start up of an instance with #wordpress. $7/mo rather than free tier. first 90 days free.Let's see how many times I have to do this before I get it right! Nothing puts hair on my palms, screams in my home and poop in my toilet like amateur web administration #indieweb" @SteveDuncan September 28, 2024

• Request: need more "how to" videos that get directly into it, without any "why" for the folks that come here already convinced why.
  • +1 for adding those if available; until then, the videos & articles sections could be turned to links to those respective pages -Coyote

• Proposal: consider moving anything "Previous" or "Historical" to a separate page to shorten and simplify this one
  • +1 from Coyote

See Also

• Quick Start
• unlisted#Brainstorming
• How to transition from Twitter
• Getting Started Historical - some older content that used to be on this page and could use review/updating!

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