How to Start a News Website in India

What you need in place before a news website can go live

A news website in India needs five parts: a domain, a host, WordPress, a publishing routine, and an editorial policy page. A digital-only site does not register with the RNI, whose register covers print titles; the IT Rules 2021 code of ethics and a grievance officer do apply. Hosting starts at ₹400 a month before 18% GST.

• Domain — the name a reader sees in a WhatsApp forward before they see the story.
• Host — the server that answers when a result is announced and thousands of people arrive at once.
• WordPress — the CMS your next stringer probably already knows.
• Editorial policy — who owns the site, who writes, and how a correction is handled.
• Grievance page — a named officer and an address, not only a contact form.

The mobile app, the podcast and the studio camera can wait a year. A responsive site with a working share button reaches the same reader on the same phone at no extra cost.

What registration does a digital news website in India need?

For a website alone, none with the RNI. The Registrar of Newspapers for India, now administered through the Press Registrar General, registers print newspapers and periodicals under the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867. A portal that publishes only online sits outside that register.

That gap is where money gets wasted. Agencies sell "news portal registration" packages that produce either a print title the buyer never prints, or a private certificate with no legal standing. Ask which register a paper comes from before you pay for one.

What does apply is the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Part III sets a code of ethics for digital news publishers, and the site has to publish who runs it, how to complain, and the name and contact of a grievance officer. The Press Council of India covers newspapers and news agencies, not a digital-only portal.

• RNI and PRGI title registration — print periodicals only.
• IT Rules 2021, Part III — code of ethics, ownership details, grievance officer.
• Proprietorship, LLP or private limited company — needed to open a current account and bill advertisers, not to publish.
• Trademark — worth filing once the name has readers; news reporting services sit in Class 41.

If you also print a weekly, the print title needs RNI registration and the website can run as its digital arm. Keep the two records separate: the print certificate does not cover the site, and the site does not need it.

Step 1: fix the beat, the name, and the domain

Pick one beat you can still cover on a bad day: a municipal ward, a district court, an admissions cycle, a mandi price. National headlines are already covered by newsrooms with forty reporters; a block-level story nobody else files is a front page you can own.

1. Write the beat in one line, such as "civic and transport news for one city", and list the twenty institutions that will produce stories every week.
2. Check the name in three places: the search on our domain registration page, the same handle on X and Instagram, and a plain Google search for the exact phrase.
3. Register the domain and take the matching handle the same day. A name is only a brand when the domain and the handle agree.
4. Keep it short enough to fit a byline. Two words beat four, and a name you have to spell out on the phone loses readers.

Avoid a name one letter away from a channel you do not own. That is a legal notice with a delivery date, not a branding decision.

Step 2: choose hosting that survives a live event

News traffic is spiky, not steady: two hundred readers an hour becomes eight thousand in ten minutes when a result is declared. Choose on CPU and concurrent processes, because a cached page is cheap to serve and a logged-in editor waiting on wp-admin is not.

Move up on evidence, not fear: the page cache hit ratio falling, 503s during a spike, or editors timing out in wp-admin. The hosting decision is covered in depth in news website hosting in India; when shared runs out, VPS hosting gives you root and a fixed monthly bill.

Turn on HTTPS before the first story, not after the first complaint. cPanel issues a free AutoSSL certificate for the domain, and a paid Sectigo Positive SSL is ₹1,800 a year if you want a brand name on the certificate.

Step 3: set WordPress up so a story indexes in minutes

Install WordPress from cPanel, then change five settings before the first post. A default install behaves like a hobby blog, which is why new portals sit unindexed for weeks while the reporters keep filing.

1. Settings, then Permalinks: choose Post name. A dated URL cannot be refreshed when a story is updated.
2. Settings, then General: set the timezone to Asia/Kolkata. Every published time in the sitemap and in the schema is read from it.
3. Posts, then Categories: one category per section — City, Crime, Sport — and keep each name to a single word so the URL stays short.
4. Users: give every writer a personal login with a real display name and a filled bio. A named author is what Google News policies call transparency.
5. Rank Math or Yoast: switch on the news sitemap, fill the organisation details, and leave article dates tied to publish and last-modified.

Two theme choices matter more than the design: a homepage that can be cached for five minutes during a spike, and a share card that renders the headline at 1200 pixels wide. Both decide what a reader sees in a WhatsApp group before they reach the site.

You know it worked when you open a published story, view the source, and the JSON-LD names Article or NewsArticle with a datePublished and a real author. If the byline says "admin", the schema says it too.

Step 4: get the site into Google News and Discover

There is no submit button that adds a site to Google News. Google crawls and decides, and the Publisher Center profile controls how a publication is branded rather than whether it is included. What you can control is eligibility.

• Verify the domain in Search Console and submit the sitemap index, not one article URL.
• Publish About, Contact, Editorial Policy and a corrections page. Reviewers look for them, and readers check them before they trust a byline.
• Date every story, and change that date only when the facts change.
• Keep the max-image-preview:large robots tag so Discover can use a wide image.
• File original reporting. A feed of wire copy with the words moved around is the most common reason a new publisher is passed over.

Expect weeks, not days, before a new domain earns News or Discover impressions. Nothing on the hosting bill speeds that up; a clean sitemap and four original stories a day do.

Step 5: turn traffic into money after the audience exists

AdSense judges a site, not an idea. It looks for original reporting, the trust pages, and enough published stories for a reviewer to form a view. A portal with twelve stories and a copied feed is rejected for low-value content, and reapplying with the same pages gets the same answer.

• AdSense — apply once the archive holds original stories and the policy pages are live. Ads on a slow page cost you the reader and the impression.
• Direct local ads — a hospital, coaching centre or car dealer pays more per thousand views than a network, and pays against a GST invoice.
• Subscriptions — only on a beat readers cannot get elsewhere. A paywall on general news usually just lowers reach.

Do not buy traffic to reach a threshold. Invalid traffic is the fastest route to a disabled account, and a disabled account is harder to reopen than a rejected application.

Launch checklist: what finished looks like

1. Five sections hold three stories each, every one with a named author and a date.
2. About, Contact, Editorial Policy, Corrections and Privacy are live and linked in the footer. Open them on a phone.
3. HTTPS holds on the homepage, on an article and on the sitemap, with no mixed-content warning in the browser console.
4. The sitemap index opens, lists the news sitemap, and Search Console reports it as Success.
5. Paste an article link into WhatsApp and check that the headline and image appear.
6. The homepage loads in under three seconds on 4G in a private window, and a cached article in under two.
7. Ask ten people to open the same story at once, then read the error log for 503s.
8. Send a test mail to the grievance address and confirm the reply reaches a real inbox, not a black hole.

What the first year costs in INR

WebJi® hosting figures are before 18% GST. Everything else depends on how much of the work you do yourself.

Month one on the WordPress plan is ₹472 after GST. A custom build or a theme licence is quoted by email at support@webji.services before you pay. Support runs 24/7 by email in Hindi and English, and the average first reply is under 60 minutes.