The short version: you need a laptop you already own, a domain name for about £10 a year, hosting for £3 to £8 a month, and roughly two hours to set up WordPress. Everything else people tell you to buy, the ring light, the fancy camera, the £40 a month course, is optional and mostly a way of avoiding the actual writing. I’ve been blogging since 2007 and I still use a £400 laptop.
The three things you cannot start without
I get asked this constantly by people wanting to make money online, and they always expect a long list. There isn’t one. You need three things and I mean just three.
- A domain name. Not a free WordPress.com subdomain, an actual domain like yourname.com. It costs around £10 to £12 a year through somewhere like GoDaddy or Namecheap. This is non-negotiable because “yourname.wordpress.com” tells everyone you’re not serious, and Google treats it differently too.
- Hosting. This is the server space where your blog lives. Bluehost, SiteGround, and Hostinger all do beginner packages between £3 and £8 a month. I used Bluehost for my first four years of blogging because it was cheap and it worked, not because anyone paid me to say that.
- A computer that turns on and connects to the internet. That’s it. Any laptop from the last six years will run WordPress fine in a browser. Your blog software isn’t sitting on your machine, it’s sitting on the server, so your laptop just needs to open a web page.
Total cost to launch: around £50 to £100 for the first year, all in. That’s the entire barrier to entry. Anyone telling you it costs more than that is usually selling you something.
What people tell you to buy that you don’t need yet
Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud: most of the “blogging setup” content out there is written by people selling affiliate links to cameras, microphones, and courses. I’ve written that content myself for clients, so I know exactly how it gets made. Someone writes “essential equipment for bloggers,” lists fifteen items with Amazon links, and gets a commission on every one you buy. It’s not malicious, it’s just not honest about what you need on day one.
Skip these until you’ve published at least 20 posts and have some actual traffic to justify the spend:
- A DSLR camera. Your phone camera is fine for blog photos. I shot every image on my blog for the first three years with an iPhone 5. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
- A standing desk. Nice to have, changes nothing about whether people read your blog.
- A £30 a month writing tool subscription. Google Docs is free and does the job. Grammarly’s free tier catches the typos that matter.
- A premium WordPress theme. The free themes in the WordPress directory, Astra and Neve especially, are clean and fast. Paid themes matter more once you have an established audience and specific design needs.
- A ring light and microphone. These matter for video, not for blogging. If you’re planning to branch into video later, that’s a separate investment and a separate skill, and it’s worth reading up on it separately rather than buying kit now for a format you haven’t started yet.
The equipment question everyone gets backwards
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I don’t see written anywhere else on this topic: buying equipment is often procrastination dressed up as preparation. I’ve watched dozens of people I’ve mentored spend three weeks comparing hosting providers and picking the perfect theme, and never publish a single post. The equipment was never the problem. Sitting down and writing something worth reading was the problem, and no amount of kit fixes that.
When I relaunched my own blog after five rough years in business, I didn’t buy anything new. Same old laptop, same £4 a month hosting plan I’d had for years, same free theme. What changed was that I sat down and wrote, badly at first, three times a week, whether I felt ready or not. The equipment list is a distraction people reach for because it feels productive without being frightening. Writing the actual post is the frightening part.
What you need once you’re past post number one
Once you’ve got a handful of posts up and you’re serious about this being more than a hobby, a few extra things start earning their keep:
- An SEO plugin. Yoast SEO or Rank Math, both have solid free versions, and they’ll flag basic things like missing meta descriptions.
- A backup plugin. UpdraftPlus, free version, set to back up weekly. I learned this one the hard way when a plugin conflict wiped a client’s site in 2015 and there was no recent backup. Never again.
- An email service. MailerLite or Mailchimp, both free up to a decent number of subscribers. Your blog readers are borrowed, your email list is owned, and that distinction matters more than any piece of physical equipment on this list.
- A basic image editor. Canva’s free tier handles featured images and social graphics without needing Photoshop skills. If you want to go further into visual content, there’s a wider set of visual content marketing tools worth exploring once your blog has some traction.
Step by step: what to do this week
If you want the practical order, here’s the exact sequence I’d give a client starting from zero:
- Day 1: Buy your domain name (10 minutes, roughly £10 to £12 for the year).
- Day 1: Sign up for hosting and use their one-click WordPress install, which most beginner hosting packages include (20 minutes).
- Day 2: Install a free theme, set up your homepage and an About page (2 to 3 hours).
- Day 3 to 7: Write and publish your first three posts. Don’t touch settings again until this is done.
- Week 2: Install Yoast or Rank Math and UpdraftPlus. Set up a free MailerLite account and add a simple signup form.
That’s the entire technical setup. It’s a weekend project, not a month-long research exercise.
A note on time, because that’s the real equipment
If you’re blogging alongside a full-time job or working from home already, the scarce resource isn’t your laptop, it’s your hours. I’d rather you spent three weekends writing than three weekends comparing hosting providers on forums. If you’re figuring out how blogging fits around other work you can realistically do from home, treat the equipment setup as the one hour job it is, and put the rest of your time into the writing, because that’s what readers, and Google, respond to. And if working from a spare room or kitchen table is new to you, it’s worth reading up on staying effective while working from home before you get three months in and burn out on the routine, not the equipment.
If money is the goal here rather than just the writing itself, blogging sits inside a much bigger picture of ways to make money online, and it’s worth being clear early on whether you’re building a hobby, a lead generation tool for a business, or a monetised publication, because that decision affects your content plan far more than any piece of equipment ever will.
The one place spending more pays off
If there’s a genuine exception to “don’t spend money yet,” it’s managed WordPress hosting once your blog starts getting real traffic, say 5,000 visits a month or more. At that point, upgrading from £4 a month shared hosting to £20 to £30 a month managed hosting (WP Engine or Kinsura are common choices) buys you speed and uptime that affects whether Google ranks you and whether readers stick around. That’s a real equipment upgrade worth making. Buying it on day one, before you have a single reader, is just spending money to feel like a blogger instead of being one.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a laptop specifically, or will a tablet or phone work?
A laptop makes writing and formatting far easier, but you can technically set up and publish a WordPress blog from a tablet or phone. I wouldn’t recommend it long term because managing plugins and images on a small screen slows you down considerably, but it’s not a hard blocker if it’s all you have.
Is free WordPress hosting good enough to start?
Free hosting through WordPress.com puts you on a subdomain (yourname.wordpress.com), limits your plugin choices, and often shows ads you don’t control. For under £10 a month you get your own domain and full control, which matters far more once you want to monetise or look credible to readers.
Do I need to buy a camera to blog?
No. Your phone camera is fine for the vast majority of blog photography. Camera equipment matters far more if you move into video content, which is a separate decision with its own learning curve worth researching on its own terms.
How much should I budget to start a blog?
Between £50 and £100 for the first year covers your domain, hosting, and nothing else. Anything beyond that in the first month, themes, courses, extra tools, isn’t equipment you need, it’s spending that can wait until you’ve got posts published and readers arriving.
Worth a read if this is your situation: hosting write for us page.
