How To Install WordPress

In this article we will tell you how to Install WordPress in 7 Easy Steps. If you are interested in building a WordPress website you will first need to know how to install WordPress and this is the definative Guide for Manual WordPress Installation.

About WordPress

WordPress (WordPress.org) is a  Free open source content management system originally built for blogging. WordPress was released in 2003 by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress features a plugin and template based architecture and, over the years, has drawn thousands of developers to create custom plugins, and themes which can now be used to create rich and diverse array and types of websites for almost any application or business need.

WordPress is used on more than 60 million websites worldwide and, as of April 2019, and nearly 34% of the top 10 million global websites have been built using WordPress. Today, WordPress is the #1 website content management system in use globally.

Now that you know a little bit about WordPress, here is a step-by-step guide on how how to manually install and setup a WordPress site for your domain, if you have a desire to build a WordPress website of your own.

What You Need To Get Started

Domain Name

A domain name is your company’s online address. It is a repository for your company’s online business identity and the public face of your brand. Your domain name can be one of the most important decisions you will have to initially make when you are deciding to create an online identity for your business. There are tens of millions of domain names already in use out there, so finding the perfect domain name for your business is important and can require some creative thought. For example if your company name is “New Penny Plumbing” you might try to see if the domain newpennyplumbing.com, or newpennyplumbing.net or similar domain name is available.You can do searches for available domain names at a domain registrar such as GoDaddy.com.

WordPress Website Hosting

After you acquire a domain name, next you will need to find a Web Hosting Service where your website and all your site files will reside. There are dozens of WordPress Hosting Providers out there. Do a web search for WordPress Hosting and you will see many results. What are you are typically looking for is a WordPress Hosting company that offers what is called a CPanel where you can do things like setting up a SQL database for your WordPress site, set up personal emails for your domain, and which offers online caching, SSD Drives, plugins to help optimize images sizes and compression, SSL Certificates for online security, and other performance and backup capabilities. We recommend hosting services such as SiteGround.com and InMotion Hosting Services because of their High-Performance Hosting Service Capabilities.

Install WordPress in 7 Easy Steps

Now that you have acquired a Domain Name for your website, and a WordPress Hosting Account, and you are ready to now start installing WordPress, here are the 7 Steps for Installing WordPress.

1. Point your Domain to your new Hosting Account

When you get your new WordPress Hosting Account you will be provided with the nameservers for your site. You will need to go to your web registrar where you purchased your domain, login to your account and set the name servers to point to the name servers of your hosting account. One you have set those it will typically take a few hours to propagate through the Internet so all browsers every where know where your domain name points to, which is your hosting account. If you use a registrar such as GoDaddy.com it will typically propagate fairly quickly, within a few hours.

2. Download WordPress Software

As mentioned above WordPress is Free to download and install. Just go to https://wordpress.org/download/ and click the download button to get the latest copy of WordPress. Once you have downloaded WordPress, create a local directory on your hard disk, copy the wordPress-5.x.x.zip file to that local directory and unzip it to the root of that directory. If you don’t already have a ZIP utility such as the paid WinZip Utility, you can use a free Zip utility such as 7-Zip to unzip your WordPress files.

3. Use FTP Client to Upload WordPress Files to your Hosting Server

In order to upload the WordPress files to your hosting site you will need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Client and you will need FTP Information from you WordPress Hosting Provider so you can setup your FTP client to transfer the files.  If you don’t already have an FTP client software application you use, you can find several free FTP clients. One popular FREE FTP Client is FileZilla.  Click the following FileZilla Download link to get the FREE FileZilla FTP Client, and click the following link to view the FileZilla Documentation. We won’t go into how to use FileZilla in this article but you will need the following information in order to transfer your WordPress files to your server.

• Host FTP Server Address – Typically an IP address or a server name
• Username – Typically Username is same user name used to access your Cpanel.
• Password – Typically Password is same password used to access your Cpanel.
• Remote Directory – Typically the remote directory will be /public_html/
• Local Directory  – This is the directory where you have unzipped your WordPress files after you downloaded them (Example: C:/website/WordPress)

4. Get FTP Information from your WordPress Cpanel

When you signup for a WordPress Hosting account you should receive a welcome email with information on how to access your administrative account as well as information on how to access your CPanel account including URL, Username, and Password. Find that information from your hosting provider and login to your CPanel. and login to your CPanel. Your CPanel should look something like this:

You can see in the top Files area there is an item called FTP accounts. In there you can setup an FTP account to use with FileZilla or another FTP client. If you are unsure how to setup an FTP account or configure your FTP client you can talk to your Web Hosting Tech Support group and they can step you through it. Once you have your FTP client Configured, upload your WordPress Files to your hosting site.

5. Setup Your WordPress Database

Next you will need to setup a Database and a Database User and Password using your CPanel. Go into your CPanel as discussed above in the FTP section and find the Databases section. Select the MySQL Databases link. Clicking this link typically will initiate the MySQL Database Wizard.

STEP 1: Create a Database

A MySQL database name will typically have two parts. The first part, in this case “vids380_” is assigned by the Database Wizard and is your CPanel Username followed by an underscore. The second part, in this case “wp1” is the part that you will input. This can be any alphanumeric string you want. So, in this instance the full database name that I created is “vids380_wp1”.

STEP 2: Create a Database User

A MySQL database username will again have two parts. The first part, in this case “vids380_” is again assigned by the Database Wizard and is your CPanel Username followed by an underscore. The second part, in this case “wp1” is the part that you will input. This can be any alphanumeric string you want. So, in this instance the full database name that I created is “vids380_wp1”. To keep things simple I typically name the database and the database user the same thing to keep things simple. Additionally, you will need to assign a password to the user. You can type in your own password or you can use the Password Generator Button to create your password.

STEP 3: Assign the Username you have created to the Database You have Created

This is pretty self-explanatory, but you will see a table to assign privileges to the database. Select the “All Privileges” checkbox to select all privileges which is what we want.

6. Edit the wp-config.php file and upload to server

Now that you have created your WordPress Database, the next step is to create a wp-config.php file, edit it, and upload it to your server. We do this by going to the local folders where you have unzipped your WordPress files and in the root directory of that folder you will see a file called “wp-config-sample.php”  We need to open this file and edit some entries in the top section where you will enter the Database Name, Username, and Password you created when you setup the Database above. You can use an application such as Adobe Dreamweaver or some other web development application, or if you don’t have any such application you can open the wp-config.sample.php file with a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad or whatever text editor you have on your computer. Open the file and enter the database name, username and password you created in the MySQL Settings area if the file. Then you must save this file in the same directory by the name of “wp-config.php”.  Make sure you enter these names between the single quotes or you will get a database connection error. After saving the file, upload this single file to your WordPress Server using the FTP application you used to upload the other WordPress files as described above.

7. Now you are ready to smoke test your work

If you have setup your DNS Nameservers to point to your hosting account’s nameservers you should be able to open a broswer and type in “YourDomainName.com” (insert your actual domain name) and, if successful, you should see the following initial WordPress screen.

If you see this screen, Congratulations you have Successfully Installed WordPress!

If not, please go back through all the steps above. If you have gotten through these steps successfully, select the language that you wish to use on your site from the list above and click Continue. The next screen you will see will let you set your master administrative Username and Password.  One important tip, select a username and password that only you could guess. DO NOT set your master Username as something simple like “Admin” or “YourSiteName”.  WordPress is the #1 website platform in the world, and it is the #1 website platform target for global hackers. Set your username and password as something you can remember but that no one else could ever guess. Hacker bots are scouring the internet every day looking for WordPress sites and will start trying to hack your site within days or weeks using Brute Force attacks, so do yourself a Big Big Favor and pick a username and password that no one can guess. I would highly recommend that you let the WordPress Password generator generate a complex password for your site that no one would ever guess. (See image below)

WordPress Auto Installers

In this blog post we have covered how to procure a domain; how to select a hosting provider and setup a hosting account, how to point your domain to your hosting account, how to download WordPress files, how to unzip and upload those file to your hosting server via FTP, how to create a Database using your hosting CPanel; how to edit the wp-config.php file and upload that to your hosting site, and how to initialize your WordPress site and setup a master Username and Password. This has all been a tutorial on how to Manually Setup WordPress.  This is how people have been installing and setting up WordPress since WordPress was introduces in 2003. But, WordPress Hosting providers have become more sophisticated in recent years, so if you are a novice to WordPress there are many hosting companies these day that do nothing but WordPress hosting that can help you install and setup WordPress for your, or in their CPanel they have a WordPress Auto-Installer that can do most of this work for you. You will still have to buy your domain and point your DNS nameservers to your hosting company’s nameservers, but outside of that they will do most of the work for you.