Getting Started
VeloCMS is a hosted platform — you sign up, and within a couple of minutes you're publishing. There's no server to provision, no database to migrate, and nothing to patch at 2am. We run it, update it, and keep it up, so the only infrastructure decision you'll ever make is which plan to pick. This guide walks through what happens between clicking Sign Up and publishing your first post: the onboarding wizard, connecting a domain you already own, and the one thing every new user eventually asks about — getting your data back out, in full, whenever you want it.
What you get the moment you sign up
Every plan includes managed hosting, automatic updates (you'll never see a "please upgrade your CMS" banner — new features and fixes just show up), Cloudflare R2 media storage with zero egress fees, and support when something goes sideways. You don't manage a server, renew a TLS certificate, or babysit a nightly backup job. That's the whole pitch, really: you write, we run the plumbing underneath it.
Sign up and verify your email
Head to /signup, enter your email and a password, and pick a plan — every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, card required upfront. VeloCMS emails you a verification link right away; click it, and you're dropped straight into the onboarding wizard. If the email doesn't land within a minute or two, check spam before you assume something's broken — a brand-new sender address takes a beat to earn trust with the big mail providers.
The onboarding wizard
The wizard is short on purpose, and only two of its steps are mandatory: telling us your focus at the very start, and clicking Go Live at the very end. Everything in between is skippable — you can always come back and fill it in later from Settings. First you pick a focus (blogger, photographer, podcaster, online store, whatever actually fits), then fill in your blog's name and a short description. If you're moving from somewhere else, there's an optional import step that can pull in an existing site before you go any further. From there, a short round of questions about the kind of content and features you actually want lets VeloCMS set up matching pages, plugins, and a recommended theme without you touching a settings panel yourself. Upload a logo if you have one — skip it if you don't, you can add it later — and either write your first post from scratch or let VeloCMS draft a starting point for you to edit and make your own. Pick a theme from the ones the wizard suggests, or go browse the full catalog. If your focus involves selling something, there's a shop setup step to configure your first products before you finish. Click Go Live, and your blog is public.
Connect a custom domain
Your blog is live on a free subdomain — yourname.velocms.org — the moment you finish onboarding, and that address keeps working forever, even after you add your own domain on top of it. When you're ready for something with your name on it, head to Admin → Settings → Custom Domain, type in a domain you already own, and add the DNS record VeloCMS shows you at your registrar. SSL and CDN routing through Cloudflare are handled automatically — there's no certificate to buy, renew, or think about again. The full walkthrough, including what to do if DNS gets stuck, lives in the Custom Domain Setup guide.
Publish your first post
The editor lives at Admin → Posts → New Post — a rich text editor with slash commands, an SEO panel that scores your draft on nine technical factors plus a separate readability score, and an AI assistant you can call on for one specific sentence or paragraph rather than the whole piece. Write, hit Publish, and the post is live on your blog immediately — or schedule it for later, the option sits right next to Publish. Every post ships with structured data and a sitemap entry automatically, so you don't have to think about SEO plumbing to get the basics right.
Invite your team, adjust your settings
If you're not writing alone, Admin → Team lets you invite editors by email — each one gets their own login, scoped to what they're allowed to touch. Beyond that, Admin → Settings is where the rest of the knobs live: branding, membership tiers if you're gating content behind a paywall, commerce if you're selling something, and security settings (including two-factor auth) if you want another layer on your own account.
You own your data
This is the part that matters most if a platform has ever burned you before: nothing about your content is locked in. Admin → Settings → Data Export builds a full archive of your account — every post, every member, every media reference, every setting — as a JSON file per collection, plus a manifest with checksums so you can verify the download landed intact. It's ready in minutes, not a support ticket away, and you can run it the same day you sign up if you want to see for yourself. Your member list also exports separately as a plain CSV from the Members page, ready to drop into whatever tool you're moving to. There's no export fee, no format designed to be awkward to leave with, and no waiting period. Owning your audience and your words is the actual product here — the CMS around it is just the part that makes writing and publishing pleasant.