How to Build an Awesome Band Website With WordPress (For Musicians)

As a rising band, it’s natural to want to get your music in front of as many people as possible. But, to do that, you need to establish an online presence and create a website for your band.

If you search online, you’re bound to come across many suggestions and different solutions. However, one of the easiest ways to create a website yourself is to use WordPress.

WordPress is a powerful platform that’s used by business owners, freelancers, bloggers, and artists because it’s easy to use and requires no coding whatsoever to create a website. Aside from ease of use, WordPress has a plethora of themes and plugins that allow you to style the website exactly the way you want. You can also add cool features such as an audio player, album information, event registration for your upcoming gigs, sharing buttons, and so much more.

In this post, we’ll show you how to build a band website and how to choose the best WordPress theme for your site.

How to Choose the Best WordPress Music Theme

An important part of starting your site is choosing the theme for your site. The theme will determine how your site looks so it’s important to choose one that has an attractive design and fits with your band’s style.

Although the design is important, it shouldn’t be the only deciding factor. Here are a few key things to keep in mind when shopping for a music theme for your band’s website.

1. Consider the Features

When it comes to features, you’ll want to look for a theme that has features geared toward the music industry. Luckily, there are plenty of music WordPress themes that allow you to showcase your albums and discography, share biography information for your band members, and add an audio player so visitors can listen to your latest tracks.

You’ll even find themes that allow you to promote your upcoming gigs and make it easy for fans to buy tickets directly from your website.

2. Ensure It’s Easy to Customize

Look for a theme that’s easy to customize. You’ll be able to easily spot this if you read the description of the theme, which usually says it can be customized through the theme options panel or by using the built-in Live Customizer.

Most of the themes nowadays make it easy to change fonts and colors so you shouldn’t have any problems finding the settings and adjusting them to your preferences.

3. Look for a Responsive, Fast-loading Band Theme

Lastly, make sure to opt for a WordPress band theme that has a responsive design and has been optimized to load fast. You never know where your visitors will come from and the last thing you want is for your website to display poorly on mobile devices.

Keep in mind that visitors don’t like to wait around for any website to load which is why it’s important to choose a theme that indicates it loads fast or has been optimized for speed.

How to Get Started with Your WordPress Music Website

Once you’ve found a theme you like, there are a few more steps to take before we get to actually creating your site. You’ll need to buy a domain name and a hosting plan where you will install WordPress and your preferred theme.

It’s also a good idea to prepare the content that will go on your site so you can simply copy and paste the contents when it’s time to upload it, rather than spend time searching for it.

1. Choose a Domain Name

Your domain is how your fans will find your website online. If possible, try to buy the domain name that is the same as your band’s name paired with a .COM extension. You can also add a word like "band" or "live" if you find that your desired name is taken.

In most cases, you will be able to buy the domain name at the same time as you purchase a hosting plan, which leads us to the next step.

2. Select a Hosting Plan

The next step is to choose a hosting company. There are numerous hosting companies available that offer affordable monthly plans.

If you’re unsure where to start, consider Envato Hosted. Envato Hosted offers premium managed WordPress hosting for $19 USD (+ applicable taxes) per month. This service also installs and sets up WordPress for you, along with your chosen theme. Plus, it handles all the technical details involved in site setup. 

The plan also includes:

• Up to 100,000 monthly visits of incoming traffic, 5GB of disk space, and 100GB of monthly bandwidth.


• Daily backups, server security, and site monitoring, as well as ongoing support from our team of WordPress experts.

3. Prep Your Website Content

When it comes to your content, it’s a good idea to gather and prepare all the album tracks, cover art, band member bios, and anything else that you want to include on your site. This will save you time in the long run as most themes come with demo content that you can use to quickly set up your site and then replace it with your own.

How to Create Your Musician Website

Once you’ve completed the steps above, it’s time to get to work on your site. The first thing you’ll need to do is install WordPress. Then, you can install your theme, the necessary plugins, and continue with the theme setup and customization.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be using the Solala WordPress music theme. The theme features a modern and responsive design and allows you to showcase your latest tracks, promote your upcoming gigs, feature band members, and more.

Discover more great music WordPress themes on ThemeForest, or browse through this selection of the best: 

• 
  WordPress
  
  
  17+ Best WordPress Music Themes (2017) for All Musicians
  
  
  Brenda Barron

1. Install WordPress

Let’s begin with our walkthrough by installing WordPress. If you opted for a different hosting company, they will send you a welcome email which will have information about your purchased plan, along with the username, password, and the link to your account’s control panel. Follow the link from the email and use the provided login information to log in.

After logging in, look for the Website or Scripts section and find the WordPress icon. Click the icon and follow the onscreen instructions.

Follow the prompts to enter your site title, description, username, password, and fill out your email address. Then, click the Install button.

After a few minutes, WordPress will be installed, which means you can now login to your WordPress dashboard. Simply visit www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin (replace the yoursitename.com with your actual domain name) and input the username and password you created during installation.  

2. Set up a Music WordPress Theme

To install the theme you purchased, go to Appearance > Themes > Add new. Then, click Upload Theme.

After that, find the zipped folder that contains the theme’s files and upload it. Once the installation is done, click Activate.

3. Install the Required WordPress Plugins

After you activate the theme, you’ll notice a notification in the dashboard that indicates certain plugins are required for the theme to have all of its functionality. There will be a link that points you directly to the installation screen.

Select all the plugins and click Install. The plugins will then finish installing and be immediately active.

How to Customize Your Musician WordPress Website

Now that the technical part is over, let’s proceed with the site setup. In this part, we’ll import the demo content to save time, show you how to replace the content with your own, and show you how to customize your theme.

1. Import the Demo Content

To begin, go to Solala > Demo Install. Select the preferred demo version and click the Install button. Wait for the process to complete and you will be redirected to the homepage of your site. You can look it over to ensure the import process was successful.

Now, you can customize any page on your site. To replace the content, go to Pages and click the Edit button under the page you want to work with. In this example, we’ll be editing the homepage.

The Solala theme uses Visual Composer to create the layout for all the pages on your site which makes it really easy to edit them. To edit how a particular element displays, click the pencil icon. If you want to add additional elements, use the plus icon and drag the desired element onto your page. You can also delete elements by clicking the trash can icon.

To edit the band members, look for the Team section in your site’s dashboard. Here, you can edit the dummy content and add additional band members.

2. Customize the Visual Appearance

Once you’re done replacing the content with your own, it’s time to style the visual appearance of your site. Go to Solala > Theme Settings to begin customizing your site. You’ll notice there are quite a few options here.

You can upload your own logo and background image, customize the fonts used on your site, and more. You can also customize default settings for individual pages, and insert your social media as well as tracking scripts such as Google Analytics code or Facebook Pixel. A nice thing about the Solala theme is that it allows you to optimize the performance by letting you minify the stylesheet and the scripts so your pages can load faster.

5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Musician Websites

While the Solala theme comes with quite a few useful plugins, there are a few more that are essential for every music site.

1. Featured Audio

The Featured Audio plugin comes in handy if you want to draw attention to a particular track on your album. This could be your latest release, a popular song from a previous album or any other audio track that deserves a little spotlight. It allows you to set a featured audio for each post and page and display it with a powerful HTML5 audio player. The plugin even includes five different visual styles.

2. Musicbox

If you want to create custom playlists, this plugin will allow you to insert music playlists along with a preview from iTunes including the information about the artist, song title, album name, and more. It will even link directly to tracks on iTunes so visitors can easily purchase them and add the tracks to their collection.

3. Spotify Master

If you prefer Spotify or if your music is available exclusively there, you’ll love this plugin. Spotify Master for WordPress allows you to display music tracks, playlists, and albums in any widgetized area on your site.

4. Event Organiser

As a band, you probably have a number of gigs lined up in the upcoming months. Use this plugin if you’d like to make it easy for your fans and visitors to see all the details.

Event Organiser uses a custom post type to allow you to create events and adds a number of additional features such as the possibility of repeating your event according to complex schedules and assigning your events to venues. The plugin even supports Google Maps so your fans can easily get directions to the venue you’re playing.

5. Easy Social Share Buttons

Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress allows you to increase your shares, grow your profile, build your following, get new subscribers, and drive more traffic to your site.

It allows your website visitors to share your content on more than 45 major social networks and comes with 52 beautiful templates for social sharing, and a plethora of customizations such as display, animations, and more.

Create Your Music Website With WordPress

Creating your band’s website has never been easier with the help of WordPress and a premium music theme. You've just learned all about creating websites for musicians. Use the tips above as a guideline to create your own awesome band’s website. But make the first step browsing through our music WordPress theme collection and choosing the perfect WordPress music theme for your site.