Four Easy Steps on How to Install WordPress

Ultimate Guide for WordPress Installation

In this article, we'll learn how to install the WordPress CMS. We'll discuss the installation in a step-by-step manner so that it's easy to follow. It's a painless four-step tutorial to install and set up your WordPress website. In the end, we'll also quickly run down a list of steps to do after the installation of WordPress.

WordPress CMS is a popular tool for blogging and website creation. It is one of the most used CMS's due to its quick installation process and ease of use. Moreover, you don't need to be a developer or a programmer to deal with the WordPress installation, setup, or configuration. Anyone interested in publishing their content online can easily get started. Here's a summarized breakdown of the WordPress installation process:

• Get a domain name and hosting server for your website
• Create a MySQL database and user for your website
• Download WordPress software from their site and unzip it in your respective Webroot folder
• Navigate to your domain and complete the WordPress set up

Let's go ahead and learn how to do these steps with a sample demo.

Setting Up Your Hosting Platform and Domain Name

We need to host our website on the internet for it to be available for everyone. For that, we'll need a hosting provider, a platform to make your content accessible online. Also, we need a name for our website for users to visit it; that's what our domain name will do. The hosting could be a managed one or a shared one based on your requirements. A shared server's resources are shared with many other websites along with yours. And in a managed server, the services are exclusive to your website and comes with built-in WordPress optimizations.

Now, WordPress has hundreds of hosting providers to choose from. However, we recommend Bluehost and SiteGround for shared hosting, which provides excellent services at affordable prices. And Kinsta and WPEngine for managed WordPress hosting and other premium services.

Note: You can also host your website on a VPS (Virtual Private Server). In a VPS, the resources are dedicated exclusively to you, which means that you don't need to share your bandwidth, RAM, or disk space. You will have the superuser access, and you're free to try out anything. VPS would be an ideal choice for resource-intensive projects and those demanding high stability. Inmotion would be a good choice for VPS hosting. However, a VPS is just a bare Linux server so, you will have to care of setting up the webserver and database.

Whether shared or managed, most of the hosting providers provide a free domain name for a year, at least. If you're looking to purchase your domain name from elsewhere, GoDaddy is the best place. Next, make sure that your domain name provider’s DNS (Domain Name Server) records point to your hosting provider. After getting a hosting provider and domain name, your hosting provider will have given you a username and password during the registration process. We'll log in to our hosting platform and create a MySQL database.

Before we set up the WordPress instance we need to select a hosting provider, the domain name, and a database. WordPress stores all your website data like posts, pages, and themes in a MySQL database. Because we are only working with a MySQL database, we can easily export the data from an existing database and import it into a new one. For the database creation, we first need to log into our hosting provider's client portal. This will provide an interface to manage the backend of your website, known as cPanel (Control Panel). This is how the dashboard of my cPanel looks like.

Note: Not all hosting providers use cPanel as the interface to manage the backend. Some providers have one-click installers, or auto-installers. In this article, we’re going to be using cPanel to install WordPress.

We’ll expand the databases section and click on the MySQL database wizard to create our database. Once you arrive at the database creation wizard, enter the database name. For our example below I have entered 'TestDB1' as the database name.

At the next step, the wizard will ask you to add users to the database. You’ll input a username and password for the user; these credentials will allow the user to access the database.

After the successful creation of a user, you can set the permissions each user will have. I have given all privileges to our example user ‘TestUser1’. After this step, you have successfully created a database and added a user to it! You can check the database entry in the database dashboard for validation. At this point, we have completed step two of WordPress installation.

Beginning the Install

WordPress runs on PHP and MySQL on a Linux environment. To know more about the WordPress basics, visit our previous article. We'll download the software from the official WordPress website. The software downloaded will be in a .zip format.

The next step would be to unzip the WordPress zip, which is an important step. The folder where you’ll unzip the WordPress software is public_html for my cPanel.

Note: The folder to unzip the WordPress software differs invariably. For folks installing through cPanel, it’s usually public_html. For some others, it is the www folder. And for people using VPS, they first need to upload the folder via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and then extract via SSH. But in general, we should unzip the folder in the Webroot of your service provider.

After extracting the zip folder, this is how my Webroot file structure looks like. After step three, we have successfully downloaded and installed WordPress. Also, we have hosted our website and have created a database in previous steps. Next, we should set up WordPress.

The Final Step!

Now we go the browser and type our domain/website name. In my case, my domain name is 'testing1.aetesting.xyz'. As a next step, you will be prompted with the below screen. Here, you will choose the language of your choice.

Now, WordPress will ask you to keep handy the details that you see in the screenshot below. Remember, we had noted down the database name, username, and password while creating the database? This is the place you'll use it.

Now, we enter the database name, username, and password. The host remains localhost in our case. Next, you get a prompt to run the installation on a successful connection to your database. Hit the button to begin the installation.

In the next screen, you will have to give your necessary details like site name, username, and email address. WordPress generates the password; you could keep it or change it. Whatever it is, make a note of your password.

Hurray! We have successfully installed and set up WordPress. You can now login to your WordPress site at your domain name, followed by ‘/wp-admin’. After logging in, this is how the admin dashboard looks like. To know all about the WordPress website, refer to our previous article on WordPress website basics.

And this is how our website looks like. WordPress gets installed with a default theme during installation, which we can change later.

Going the Extra Mile

Now that we have our first WordPress website, here are a few steps to follow to get started with it.

• Choose a suitable theme for your website. Install the necessary plugins
• Learn how to optimize (please insert relevant link here) your website once it is all set and running
• Know WordPress more intensely to improvise your website and your understanding of WordPress
• The following resources are of great help to learn and know WordPress better
  https://wordpress.com/learn/
  https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-learn-wordpress-for-free-in-a-week-or-less/
  https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?q=wordpress

I hope this article was helpful to you. To read more about WordPress and other CMS's, check out our resource center. Our WordPress experts here at Clarity can help you in finding business solutions for your CMS. If you have any questions or would like to speak with one of our experts, please visit our Contact Us page.