WordPress is one of the most popular and widely used CMS (Content Management system) i.e. you can use it to build your website more effectively, easily and efficiently. As you may be aware that more than one third of the websites that are now available on the internet are powered by WordPress only.
You can imagine, with this figure, how much popular WordPress is all over the world. And why not, the main reason for this popularity of WordPress lies in its user-friendly website building tools that it provides after installation inside the server. Again, the Installation of WordPress is very easy and it has been termed by WordPress as 5 Minute installation process.
There is more than one method you can use to install WordPress inside the server. Whether you choose the automatic method or the manual method, the process will hardly take more than a few minutes. Many WordPress web hosting providers gives simple clicks methods to install WordPress inside them.
This tutorial will guide you through how you can install WordPress with utmost easy way, and this will be for beginner level to the advanced level user and they may choose whichever way they want to install WordPress.
Those who are beginners, purchased hosting plans and domains aiming to start a website may install WordPress directly through the one-click installation process provided by the popular hosting platforms and this will be very easy guide through wizard.
For the users who are in the intermediate level and want to have some sort of control over the file management, may use the FTP method to install WordPress manually using FTP client such as FileZilla.
Finally, for the developers and advanced user, who are more prone to use WordPress on an experimental basis may install it on their local machine Windows, Mac, Linux etc. This step may require some sort of advanced knowledge over file management, server management, and coding. In this level, we’ll also know how you can install WordPress on cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc.
Besides that, you’ll find the tips and tricks of WordPress after its installation and what you must do after the installation, so that you can run the website in a more desirable way you want. This will cover topics like choosing the best suited WordPress theme for your website, installation and use of WordPress plugins, dealing with the bugs and fixes related to WordPress etc.
So, let’s start the tutorial.
Requirements Before installing WordPress
As you know that any website that is now live on the internet must have a domain and a place to host its files. WordPress is nothing but a Management system of the files required for your website. Hence you will need to have a domain name registered for the website and a hosting provider who will provide you the place to host your website files.
One of the best hosting providers for WordPress is Bluehost and this has been recommended by most popular users. The reason behind is that it is one of the largest companies that supports websites on the hosting service in the world. Besides that, WordPress has also officially recommended the use of Bluehost hosting dedicated to WordPress user.
So, first of all we’ll focus mainly on installing WordPress on Bluehost hosting and the process will be more or less same for other hosting providers. The cPanel provided by the hosting provider companies varies little with one another and when you have known the process of installation of WordPress in Bluehost or any one of the hosting providers, you may know the installation process in other hosting as well.
How to install WordPress on Bluehost Hosting (For Beginners)
Bluehost, as we told earlier, is one of the largest hosting providers in the world and is the officially recommended hosting service for WordPress hosting. The reason behind is that Bluehost is very much familiar with the WordPress and has the easiest way of WordPress installation. After you open account with Bluehost and register your domain, it will automatically install WordPress in your server and will give you the details of your WordPress site under My Sites tab.
If you have added more than one domain, then you can find other sites in this tab with different WordPress installed in them. Click on the “Log into WordPress” and you will be redirected to the admin area of WordPress where you can do the actual site building work.
Apart from this if you want to install another WordPress for another domain you want to host with Bluehost, then you need to add your domain in this section. After that it will guide you through the installation process of WordPress.
Under the My site tab, click on the “Create Site” button to get started.
As you click, this will start the WordPress installation guide provided by Bluehost. At the very beginning, it will ask you to enter the site title and the tagline for your site. The site title is required but the tagline is optional.
After you provide the details, click on the “Next” button to continue the process.
Now, in this section, you will be asked to provide the domain name and path (Directory) for your website. If you have already purchased domains from the Bluehost itself, then you can find them in the drop-down menu, and if not, you can type in the domain purchased somewhere else. If you have not purchased any domains and want to have one, then you can always add new domains by going to the Domains page from the Bluehost Dashboard.
Type the directory name where you want to store the files related to the site. You can leave it blank to store the files in the root directory or give a name of the folder.
The Bluehost WordPress installer may recommend some useful plugins that should be installed along with the WordPress installation. If you want, you may tick mark the plugin and Click on “Next” to continue the process.
After you click “Next” button, the installer will take a few moments to install WordPress and a message for the successful installation will be shown with the details related to the WordPress Admin Panel using which you can log into the WordPress Dashboard.
Don’t worry about the details if you forgot to take screenshot of them. This will be emailed to your registered email for your reference and you can always log into WordPress Dashboard by entering these credentials.
With this, you have just installed WordPress automatically with some clicks on your Bluehost hosting.
How to install WordPress on Hostinger (For Beginners)
Installing WordPress in Hostinger web server is one of the easiest job you can do for your website. If you have hosting plan under Hostinger hosting provider, then just login to your account to start the process of installing WordPress. You can install WordPress in Hostinger hosting with just 1 clicks.
After you have login to your hosting account, click on the ‘Auto Installer’ option to open the next which will contains some of the ready made apps that you can install in your web server. This list also contains our most popular CMS WordPress.
Here you can select the WordPress, click on ‘Select’ button to start the WordPress installation process.
In this stage, you can give all the information required for your website, database, language of the wordpress, Website title, etc. Hostinger has made the installation process so easier that you can give all the information at once and install WordPress with just one Click.
First of all select the ‘https’ or ‘http’ as the case for your website you want to have. The former is the more secure and mostly recommended. Then after the domain name, choose the path where you want to install the WordPress.
If you leave the field blank, it will automatically install WordPress in the root folder of the web server.
Now give the Adminstrator Username, password, and email which will be stored in the database. Then choose the language of the WordPress installation.
For the database creation, hostinger provides the options to select from the existing databases or create New Database. We recommend creating new database for a fresh installation of wordpress.
After that it shows the required disk space, PHP version, and MySQL version along with which WordPress is going to be isntalled in the hostinger web server.
Finally click on ‘Install’ button to start the installation process.
As soon as you have provided and valid information and clicked the ‘Install’ button, it will install WordPress automatically within seconds and shows the list of installed WordPress under Auto Installer section.
That’s it. You have installed WordPress automatically in Hostinger web server. You can log into the WordPress admin page by clicking the WordPress icon in the right hand to the respective Installed WordPress.
How to install WordPress using FTP Clients (For Intermediate)
As we have seen, installing WordPress in hosting providers like Bluehost and Hostinger requires only few clicks after providing basic details like site title, tagline, and some database name and password. This section of installation process is for intermediate those who want to install WordPress manually. You will be surprised to know that this manual process of installation is popularly termed by the WordPress as 5 Minute install because of its simplicity in the installation process even manually.
To install WordPress manually in your server, you will need a FTP Client (File Transfer Protocol Client) to upload the files of WordPress into your server. We recommend using the FileZilla FTP client and you can download and install the latest version of it from its official website.
Then the thing that you need is to download the Latest version of WordPress from the official WordPress website. Every version of WordPress package file is ZIP file that itself contains a folder named “WordPress”. This folder contains all the required files for your website in order to install WordPress and you will upload the files into the web server during manual installation.
If you are familiar with connecting FTP client to the hosting server, then connect your hosting server to the FileZilla (FTP client in this case). After the connection, you may upload all the files inside the WordPress folder.
As you may know that the left side of the FTP client windows contains the local machine i.e. your computer and right-side panel contains the web server side. First of all, locate the downloaded WordPress folder on the left side panel and enter inside the folder to locate all the WordPress installation files.
Now, you may choose in which directory you want to install WordPress on the webserver. If you prefer to install in the root directory generally the directory is /public_html/, and your website address will be like example.com, then head over to the root directory.
If you haven’t installed any other WordPress or stored any other files in this directory, then this should be empty.
Or, if you prefer your website address be like example.com/blog, then you may need to install WordPress in a subfolder ‘blog’ and not in the root directory.
On the left side panel of FTP client window, select all the files inside the WordPress folder, right click on it, click on ‘Upload’, and this will upload all the files to the desired folder in the web server. You can track the upload progress in the status bar located at the bottom of the windows.
Now, the first part of installing WordPress manually is over i.e. uploading the required WordPress files to the web server. Now we’ll create a database in which we’ll store all the needed information for the website.
In order to do so, you may head over to the cPanel of your hosting provider and search for MySQL. The interfaces will be different for different hosting provider, but you will find MySQL somewhere in the cPanel.
When you find MySQL, click on it and now you will create a database for your website.
For the first field, provide the name of the database, and then a username to assign it to the database to perform all required admin level actions. A user for the database, if given required permissions, can perform different actions in the database. Provide the username in the username field.
After that you need to create a password for the user in order to login to the MySQL database.
After you have given all the required information, click on “Create” button to create the database.
This will create a database and its user with provided username and password. But this is not enough. We need to give permissions to the user to perform all the required admin level actions. For that scroll down a little bit to find the List of MySQL databases and Users. Select the database created earlier, click on “More actions” and then “Change permissions”.
Here you can assign the user, depending upon the level of user, the required permissions and when you are done, click on ‘Update’.
Now your MySQL database and the user are now ready for action. In order to be at a safe side, note down the details of the databases and user, i.e. database name and MySQL username and password. You will need this information later while we’ll work with the WordPress files.
Just revising of what we have done so far- We have uploaded the WordPress files to the root directory of our web server, created a database, a database user with password and required permissions. That’s it.
Now, open the browser and type in the URL of the uploaded WordPress file. If you have uploaded it to the root directory, then the address will be like yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com. Enter the URL and this will open the wizard for the WordPress installation inside the browser.
Select the Language and click on ‘Continue’ button to proceed.
WordPress basically shows some information regarding the installation process. This instruction contains what WordPress will need during the installation process i.e. database name, database username, database password, database host, and Table prefix etc.
Read the information and ready with all above required information. Click on ‘Let’s go’ button to proceed.
Here, WordPress will provide you a form where you need to type in all the above-mentioned information. Fill in the information and click on ‘Submit’ button. If everything goes right WordPress will connect to your provided database and shows you a success message and a button to run the WordPress installation.
Click on ‘Run the installation’ button to proceed.
As per the provided name of database, WordPress connect the database and will create some table in the database for storing of data related to your website and in the next step it will ask for some basic information about your website.
The basic information that you need to provide to set WordPress is like site title, username, password and admin email address etc.
There is an option which will discourage the search engines from indexing your site. If you have planned to let not the search engine index your site, then you can leave that field ticked.
Finally, click on Install WordPress button to start the show, i.e. install the WordPress in the web server. After successful completion of the installation, you will see a success message with username and password written on it. Click on ‘Log in’ button to head over to WordPress admin page.
With this we have completed installing WordPress manually via FTP.
How to install WordPress on Local Machine (For Advanced)
if you are planning to install WordPress on your local machine windows, Mac or Linux for the purpose of testing themes and plugins, developing your site and testing other things out, then you can download and install WAMP server on your local machine and install WordPress.
One thing you may be aware that, when you install WordPress on your local machine, the only user that can access to your website is you (of course others those who are connected to the machine or the same local network). But this website is not available to the rest of the world.
That is the website installed in local machine is not accessible through the internet. For that you need to host your website files or WordPress files in a remote hosting provided by a hosting provider company and you can install WordPress in their web server by using one of the methods we have discussed above.
But for the testing purpose, installing WordPress on local machine is a best way to develop things and then you can always make your website live by uploading it to the web server.
What to do After Installing WordPress on Hosting
The main work starts after installing the WordPress because you will do the actual work for your website i.e. writing content and other things. But in order for smooth functioning of your WordPress site, you need to take care of some things that we have mentioned below.
WordPress Theme
The visual appearance and the user interface of your website which has been powered by WordPress is mainly controlled by WordPress Themes. Themes are nothing but all the required content files for your website. It contains all sorts of html, php, CSS, js, and other files.
But you don’t need to worry about all those. WordPress has already taken care of all these things. It has sorted out everything and has made it simple to use by creating a visual representation of the website inside the WordPress so that you can manage the content of the website with just mouse clicks and not typing codes in different website files.
If you are beginner, then we have made videos for you of how you can install WordPress theme on your website.
WordPress Plugin
Before WordPress, when someone wants to add some more functionality to the website, he needs to type in code and add to the required files and required section, test things out, and publish it. If everything goes right, then the functionality used to work.
But the WordPress Plugins are the real booster of the WordPress. They are like the apps for WordPress that you can use in order to add more required functionality to your site and extend the feature of your website.
WordPress plugins are a package or codes that are prewritten for a specific task to perform. You can just them to the WordPress site depending upon the task it perform and add the functionality to your website.
WordPress contains a huge repository of WordPress Plugin and host over 55000 free plugins to use. There are also paid plugins from third party website with some more premium features. You can buy them and install it on your site.
If you are a beginner, then you can always refer to how you can install WordPress Plugin easily in your site.
Conclusion
This tutorial has been written with utmost care, keeping a view on all sort of users ranging from beginners to advanced. We hope this tutorial of WordPress Installation gives some help you learn how to easily install WordPress both on web hosting and local host.
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