How to Install WordPress – Step by Step Guide
Building a website for your business or personal brand is a must these days. If you don’t show up for your customers online, you are leaving a ton of money on the table. Although there are many ways to build your website, the easiest way is using CMS.
CMS stands for “Content Management System” and it will help you to build a website easily. You don’t need to be tech-savvy, and you don’t need a web developer.
To build a website using CMS, we highly recommend using WordPress. WordPress tops the list of the three most often used CMS in the world, followed by Joomla and Drupal.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a system that allows you to manage your website contents in an organized way and building pages easily. It is one of the site builders and content management systems users can download and install for free.
Why WordPress?
WordPress powers nearly 35% of the world’s websites and about 53% of all CMS and website builders. For small personal blogs or the complex sites of major corporations. With all available plugins and extensions, you can literally do anything you need on your website.
How Much Does it Cost?
WordPress is totally FREE open source and you can use or install it for any purpose without paying a penny. Of course, there are premium plugins & themes that you may need to pay for, but there are a ton of FREE themes and plugins to use.
How to Install WordPress?
Installing WordPress is not a complicated process, it also depends on your hosting environment. Most hosting providers allow you to install WordPress using one-click action on their control panels. cPanel also has WordPress package ships with it and you can install using one-click action. Here are the most common ways to install WordPress on your server or localhost:
1- Install WordPress Manually
This is the most common way when you want to install WordPress on your localhost or a cloud server. Using the manual installation, you will need to download WordPress package and upload it to your server using FTP.
1.1. Download WordPress Package
To download WordPress package, you need to go to wordpress.org and download the latest version by clicking the “Download WordPress” button. This will download a ZIP file that includes all files and folders of WordPress package.
You can also download WordPress from Github by going to WordPress repository page and get the ZIP package from there by clicking on Code > Download ZIP
1.2. Upload WordPress Package
After downloading WordPress ZIP folder, upload it to your server via FTP using any FTP Client like FileZilla and extract the ZIP file to the public directory on your server. Now you are ready to install WordPress on your server.
1.3. Create The Database
Before you proceed with installing WordPress, you need to create and prepare the database. The database is where WordPress saves and retrieves your website data. Using your cPanel or PHPMyAdmin, create your database and MySQL user and grant all privileges to the user on the database.
Click on “MySQL ® Databases” to open cPanel MySQL Database manager, add your preferred database name and click “Creare Database”
Second, You will need to add your existing MySQL user to the database you have created or create a new user. Scroll down on the same screen to the “Add New User” section and create your user then, add it to your database
Once you have your database name, MySQL username, and password, you are ready to get back to WordPress and complete the setup.
1.4. Install WordPress
Open your website domain or subdomain where you have the WordPress package uploaded using your browser and you should see the WordPress setup screen now asking to select your preferred language
Select your preferred language for your website and click “Continue” to go to the next screen. Make sure you have all information you will need which is listed on this page like [database name – database username – database password] and you should have all of this information from the previous step 1.3 create the database. Once you have all information, click “Let’s go!”.
Now enter the information you have in each related field [database name – database username – database password] and keep the table prefix field as is or change it for any prefix you want, we recommend that you change it for something else for security purposes. Click “Submit” to install WordPress and connect to the database.
WordPress now is ready to be installed, next step is to create your WordPress admin user and password and give your website a title. On this screen, update your website title then create your admin username, password, and email address and click on “Install WordPress” button. You will use this information to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard later.
Here you go! You have successfully installed your first WordPress website and are ready to start building your website. You should be redirected now to the WordPress admin login page, use the username and password you set on the setup screen to login to your WordPress admin dashboard. Here is what you will see once you login to the admin dashboard.
2- Install WordPress from cPanel
Most hosting providers now are adding cPanel on their servers to allow users to manage and control their hosting environment easily and efficiently. If you have cPanel installed and available on your hosting environment, follow this step to install WordPress using the one-client feature from cPanel.
cPanel will make it away easier for you to install WordPress on your server because you don’t need to upload any files or create a database and MySQL user attached to it. It will be done with just a few clicks and here is how:
From your cPanel home screen, go to the “Domains” section and find “WordPress Toolkit”
Click on “Install WordPress” to configure your WordPress settings and set your admin username, email, and password. Once you click the button, a new screen will popup where you can set all settings
Once you are done adding all your data, click “Install” and keep it running until the confirmation message returned. Now you have installed WordPress on your server.