A handy guide for anyone who can use it, from someone who’s been doing this for a while.

This is part of the “how do I webcomic?” series, with useful information on all kinds of comicking-related topics.

If you don’t need all the step-by-step explanations or nitty-gritty details, here, I’ll put the takeaway right at the top:

1) Sign up with the host of your choice (prices vary)
2) Install Wordpress (free)
3) Add the Webcomic 5 plugin and the Inkblot theme (free) [ETA, June 2023: I’m seeing reports that this plugin breaks with PHP 8. Will cautiously rec Toocheke instead. Scroll down for more detail.]
4) Upload your comics!

If you do want a detailed explanation of each step, though, keep reading.

This is mostly directed at people who are familiar with the Tumblr blogging system, but the same process will work for anyone. I’m gonna try to make it as dead-simple 101-level as possible, so feel free to skip the sections you already know.

Such as, perhaps…

0) Background: Wait, why Tumblr?

This post was written in December 2018, shortly after Tumblr announced a ban on all “mature content.” Which would remove pages from any comic that ever got NSFW…along with plenty of pages that were completely worksafe, since the content-flagging was done by overenthusiastic bots.

Tumblr also hid tons of content from search results, including anything tagged “lesbian” or “transgender”, anything tagged with a character name like Dick Grayson, anything with an external link (say, to your own Patreon)…

It was a mess. Even if your webcomic got through this completely unscathed, you still lost a bunch of viewers as other users decamped from Tumblr en masse.

It wasn’t the first time something like this happened, and it won’t be the last. Less than a year later, in November 2019, SmackJeeves announced the end of custom site layouts and domain names, kicking off their own mass exodus of comic creators looking for a new home.

If your comic is on a free-to-use hosting site, no matter which one it is, there is a very high chance that one day they’ll make a decision that sends you looking for a post like this.

0.5) What if, at least for now, I just want to move to another free hosting site?

Maybe you can’t afford to spend anything on hosting right now. Or your comic is 100% a casual hobby that you don’t want to put too much work into. Whatever your reasons, this is also a valid way to go.

I break down the features and advantages of some of the major Free Webcomic Hosting Options in “Help, I want to make a new webcomic, how do I start?”

Don’t just pick one at random — choose the one that’s right for your comic. Hopefully you’ll get lucky, and it’ll be a good reliable host for years to come!

But, as history has shown, no site can be trusted forever.

Whenever you hit the point where you’re prepared to invest some money in your comic’s long-term security, you should move on to…

1) Choosing an Independent Website Host

This also involves doing some research, to figure out the cheapest hosting plan that will cover your comic’s needs. (I won’t even try to list all the hosting services out there.)

Some things to consider:

Storage space. How big is your current “finished comic pages” folder? (Image files will be your biggest space-eater.) How often do you update? Look for a plan that you won’t just outgrow in a year or two.

Traffic. A lot of plans offer “unlimited bandwidth” these days, which makes that easy. (Note, this actually means “unlimited as long as your usage doesn’t send up any red flags.” If you turn your account into a download center for high-res Doctor Who episodes, the site moderators will notice.)

Email accounts. Not exactly essential when you already have one, but it might be nice to have “me@mycomic.com” for business purposes one of these days.

Domains and subdomains. Some people buy a domain name for their comic, and that’s it. Some buy one for themselves (or their brand), and use subdomains for their comics. Some buy multiple domains for multiple comics. How many do you want right now? Will you want more in the future?

(Good news: if your situation changes, these are easy to redirect. I bought erinptah.com first, then later I added leifandthorn.com and bicatperson.com — but that doesn’t break any old links, you can still get to the sites through leifandthorn.erinptah.com and bicatperson.erinptah.com.)

Websites/SQL databases. Each separate installation of Wordpress will use its own MySQL database. (I…am pretty sure this is what most plans are talking about when they say “number of websites included.”) If you have multiple comics, or if you plan to, keep an eye on this.

So! Look up different hosting services, think about your comic’s needs and your own budget, do some side-by-side comparison, and make your own call.

A few hosts I recommend avoiding:

• A Small Orange. If you research them you’ll find a ton of great reviews…from 2015 and earlier. Those are no longer accurate. They’re the host I moved away from, after one too many unexplained downtimes.
• Squarespace/Wix. These sites are much less flexible; they don’t let you use Wordpress, or anything nearly as customizable, they just have a pre-existing content management system that everyone gets to use. It’s not designed for webcomics, and although some creators have made it work, I’m not a fan of the reading experience.

To be clear, no paid host is immune to problems of its own. The good news is, once you’re set up, it’s possible (in fact, relatively easy) to pick up the entire site and settle it on a new host in exactly the same condition.

Seriously, you can move the whole shebang. All the posts. All the comics. The layout files. Every single comment. If you want a specific case study, I migrated hosts in summer 2017.

Once you’ve purchased a hosting plan, you can move on to…

2) Installing a Content Management System

The Content Management System (CMS) is the engine that organizes your site, instead of leaving you to hand-code every page’s HTML one-by-one.

You do have options here, too. A lot of creators swear by Grawlix, which disappeared from the web for a while, but you can download the revival here. As mentioned above, SquareSpace has its own (though it’s not webcomic-friendly).

Comics in the SpiderForest Collective are offered a CMS called proPanda. Comics hosted with Hiveworks…get their web design handed over to paid professionals, so if that happens, you won’t have to think about the CMS at all.

But as long as you’re doing your own layout: there’s a reason at least one-third of the Internet runs on Wordpress.

Try it out with the free blogging site at Wordpress.com. Like Tumblr, it’ll let you set up an account and make posts. It doesn’t have all the options available on an independent website (limited themes, not much customization, the free level doesn’t allow plugins at all), but it’ll get you familiar with the basic interface.

Here’s the “add new post” form on a free Wordpress blog, side-by-side with the “add new comic” form on Leif & Thorn:

(This is the “Classic” editor. Since 2018, new Wordpress installations will default to the fancier, newer “Gutenberg” editor. If you’re starting from scratch and only want to learn one new interface, go with Gutenberg. If you’re already familiar with the old interface, or just like to explore multiple options, you can get Classic with the Classic Editor plugin.)

As for the version of Wordpress you’d install on your own website — that’s handled over at Wordpress.org.

Back when I started BICP, you had to actually download a ZIP archive, tweak some files, upload it to your hosting service, and click some buttons. Even that only took a few minutes.

These days, when you log into the administration panel on a lot of website hosts, you’ll see a button like this:

Click it, fill in the details of the site you want, and poof, you’re off to the races.

…well, partly. See, Wordpress by itself is not actually optimized for webcomics. Which is why you have to address that by…

3) Installing a Plugin to Optimize Wordpress for Webcomics

Tumblr users, you’ve all used Xkit, right? You know how it has a couple dozen different little plugins you can install, to improve and extend the way Tumblr functions?

Wordpress plugins are like that, except (a) they’re designed to work with Wordpress, not in spite of it, and (b) there’s more than 50,000 of them.

There’s a “Plugins” option in the sidebar on your Wordpress dashboard. Follow that to “Add New,” and you can find, install, and activate new plugins with (all together now!) just a few clicks.

This section updated June 2023:

Right now there are 3 widely-used plugins that will enable Wordpress with the architecture to smoothly run a webcomic:

•  Comic Easel (the successor to ComicPress), which powers But I’m A Cat Person
• Webcomic 5, which powers Leif & Thorn
• Toocheke, which I have not personally used (yet?)

As of this writing (June 2023), the most recent update for Comic Easel was 2018, and for Webcomic, in 2021. Their download pages will warn you that the plugin haven’t been (officially) tested with the latest Wordpress release, and may be out-of-date.

I’m running WordPress 6.2.2 with PHP 7 on both of my own comics, and the sites are working perfectly fine.

However! I’m hearing from other creators that Webcomic does not work with PHP 8. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Comic Easel has similar problems.

If you have an existing site, and it’s working fine now, trying to switch plugins is probably not worth the hassle. Just don’t install the upgrade to PHP 8.

(This will cause its own problems eventually…but likely not for years, and all kinds of things could be different by then. Heck, your original plugin might get updated in the meantime.)

If you’re starting a new site from scratch now, in 2023: Toocheke, the one that’s still being actively maintained, is probably your best bet.

I’ve heard that it has comparable features to Comic Easel. I haven’t tried it myself, though! Anyone who’s using it already, sound off in the comments, tell us about it.

Gonna leave this list of some of my favorite Webcomic 5-over-Comic Easel features here, and hope that Toocheke either already has them, or can build them in:

• Upload image files in bulk, and auto-generate posts for them! (Got a big archive, dreading the process of manually uploading each page? You won’t have to.)
• Host multiple comic archives on one site! (Useful if you have, say, a NSFW spinoff.)
• Put content in more places in the layout! (Important if you have a banner that you want to go in exactly the right spot.)

 

Okay, back to the layout. That’s not just handled by a plugin, you’ll also want…

3.5) Installing a Theme to Go With Your Plugin

The webcomic-related plugins usually have a theme that’s designed to work with them. Webcomic 5 has Inkblot. Toocheke has Toocheke.

You can also pick another theme — Wordpress has thousands to choose from! — and integrate the plugin with it. (I’ve heard mixed reviews about how easy that is.)

The good news is, you don’t have to stress over finding a theme that looks exactly how you want, right out of the box. No matter which one you start with, by adding your own images and playing with the layout CSS, you can customize the heck out of it.

All these wildly-different sites use the Inkblot theme!

(In order: C-Chan’s A Catgirl; 95 Gallons; The Legend of Ruach; The Devil of Angel Classroom; And Shine Heaven Now; The Oswald Chronicles.)

Click the “Appearance” option in the Wordpress sidebar, choose “Themes,” and you can search from there. Search by name, or filter by features, then install one and try it out.

Once you have it running, you can start tricking it out, using any/all of these options:

• Edit the defaults in Wordpress’s a point-and-click “Customizer” (under “Appearance” in the sidebar menu)
• Add and rearrange Widgets in your layout (also under “Appearances”)
• Use a plugin like Header, Footer, and Post Injections to add custom HTML and CSS of your own
• Make a full-on child theme, which I wrote a whole separate post about, and go wild

A lot of small handy features can be added with plugins, too. Which brings us to…

3.75) Installing Some Other Plugins

Like I said — here’s Over Fifty Thousand of these things. Any feature you always kinda wanted, but didn’t know how to code? It’s almost definitely here. (And very probably free.)

A word of warning: plugins can also have their downsides. From “opens a serious security breach” to “messes up something in your layout.”

For best results, keep these habits in mind:

• Use plugins that have high reviews, recent updates, and lots of active installations
• Keep them up-to-date (I have mine set to automatically run any new upgrades)
• Keep Wordpress itself up-to-date (some hosts will enforce this automatically)
• Activate new plugins one-at-a-time, so if anything does go wonky, you’ll know which one to blame

Here’s a few I’m using that are working out swimmingly:

• Want to add polls? You’re covered.
• Hide storyline warnings behind spoiler cuts? Got your back.
• Automatically crosspost updates to sites like Facebook and Tumblr? Can do.
• Put Patron-only content directly on the site? No problem (…well, as long as you have a Patreon).

Don’t worry about getting every possible function set up right away! You can keep adding, exploring, and tweaking those plugins any time you want.

The more-important step, the most essential thing for your whole site, is…

4) Uploading Your Comics

Wordpress does have a default import-from-Tumblr option. It’s in the sidebar under “Tools” > “Import.”

And Webcomic 5 has a mass-comic-import tool. Note, it may only get the dates right if you had a consistent and regular update schedule — but once they’re all imported, you can go back and manually edit them one-at-a-time if necessary.

You can also tag them with characters! Organize them into storylines! Easily schedule a queue of future comics! Include non-comic content (status updates, etc.) separately, as regular blog posts, so they don’t interrupt the flow of reading the archive! And more.

You have all kinds of options. And now you know your comic is in good future hands.

Any questions?

Anything I missed? Something you want to hear more about? Run into a technical-support issue and want some input?

Comment and let me know!

More useful links: Webcomic 5 wiki; lists of shortcodes and tokens (can be used throughout your layout/widgets/posts).

I’ve been hosting my comics this way for almost 8 years, and I’ve seen plenty of other series make the same upgrade after one site or another failed them. If you’re in a place where it sounds good for your comic, I want to help make it as easy as possible.