How to set up VeloCMS in 60 seconds
Go from zero to a live blog in under a minute — account creation, blog name, and your first post.
VeloCMS is designed to get you publishing in seconds, not hours. Here is the complete setup, start to finish, with no detours.
Note (October 2026): this video was recorded when the card was collected at signup. Signup now creates your site with no plan, and the site owner adds the card when starting the 14-day free trial from the dashboard or at the setup wizard's last step. Nothing is charged until day fifteen.
Read the full transcript
If you want to start a blog in 2026, you don't need a developer, a hosting plan, or a single plugin. In the next ten minutes, I'm going to sign up, answer a few quick questions, pick a theme, write a real post, and hit publish — the whole thing, live, so you can see exactly how it works.
First, the signup itself — email, a password, and a fourteen-day free trial. You add a card at checkout, but nothing is charged until day fifteen, and you can cancel anytime before then. The second you're in, VeloCMS drops you straight into a short setup wizard instead of a blank dashboard, because a blank dashboard is where most new blogs die.
This wizard is doing the heavy lifting most platforms leave to you. It asks what your blog is actually about — food, tech, travel, whatever your niche is — and a couple of questions about tone and audience. Answer honestly here, because it's about to use these answers to pick your theme automatically.
And here's the payoff: based on what you just told it, the wizard recommends a theme that already matches your niche — real typography, real layout, not a generic template you'll fight with later. You can flip through a few options and swap anytime, but this one's already close to done.
Now the part everyone dreads — the first post. Click into the editor, and if you're staring at a blank page, the built-in AI assistant will draft one for you from a single sentence. I'll type a quick idea, let it write a starting draft, and then edit it in my own voice, because that's the point — it's a draft, not a replacement.
One more click — Publish — and it's live on your own domain, with SEO already handled: a sitemap, structured data, fast page loads, all of it automatic. No separate SEO plugin to configure, because it was never optional in the first place.
So that's a blog, start to finish — sign up, answer the wizard, get a theme that fits, write a post with a little AI help, and publish. Ten minutes, no plugins, no code. Try it yourself, free, at velocms dot org.
Step 1 — Create your account
Head to the pricing page, pick a plan (Pro is the most popular), and click Start Free Trial to open signup. You will be asked for your name, email, a password, and a blog name. The blog name becomes your subdomain — for example, a blog named "Jane Writes" will live at jane-writes.velocms.org. The slug is auto-generated from the name but you can edit it. Signing up does not start the trial or ask for a card; the plan you picked is remembered and used when you start the trial in Step 3.
Step 2 — Verify your email
We send a verification link to the address you provided. Click it within 24 hours to confirm ownership. Your tenant is not created until verification — this prevents squatting on reserved slugs.
Verification emails come from [email protected]. If it is not in your inbox within 2 minutes, check the Promotions or Spam folder.
Step 3 — Start your free trial
After verification your site is created with no plan, so you can draft but not publish until the trial starts. In the onboarding wizard, the last step takes the site owner to Stripe Checkout to start the 14-day free trial on the plan you picked on the pricing page; the card is added there, and you will not be charged until day 15. If you skip the wizard, the banner at the top of the admin and the Billing page offer the same Start your 14-day free trial button. You can cancel anytime from the admin billing page and you pay nothing.
Step 4 — Write your first post
Once your trial has started you can publish (until then you can write drafts). From your admin dashboard, click the big New Post button (or press the plus icon in the bottom-right). The editor supports slash commands — type / to insert headings, lists, code blocks, or AI-generated content. Save a draft or publish immediately.
Step 5 — Share your blog
Your blog is live at your subdomain (for example jane-writes.velocms.org) the moment you publish your first post. Content is served from Cloudflare's edge network — pages are server-rendered and cached rather than built from scratch on each visit.
That is it. Five steps, about sixty seconds end-to-end, and you are a published writer.