WordPress is one of the easiest frameworks to setup your blog or website and get it installed on your site. In order to make the process easier there are a number of programs that will install WordPress for you automatically however it is always good to know how to install WordPress yourself, plus there are some things in the manual install can do that the automatic installers cannot.
This tutorial assumes that you are installing WordPress on a cPanel based web host. All of our recommended hosts are cPanel based web host. We offer a service that will setup the WordPress for you as well as give you Free Commercial & Premium themes with the install as well.
Step1: Download & Upload WordPress
The first step is to download WordPress. You can always get the most up to date at WordPress.org, also our free blog setup will always have the most up to date WordPress. Once you have download WordPress you can use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload WordPress or you can use File Manager in cPanel.
If you are using FTP you will want to make sure you are using these settings:
FTP Host/Address: (your ip address or domain name)
FTP User: (cPanel/FTP user name)
FTP Password: (cPanel/FTP password)
Port: 21
Some free ftp programs are: Filezilla FTP & Core FTP
Make sure to upload the WordPress zip file to your root directory (public_html) and then extract the files from the zip file. (If you extract the .zip).
If you are going to upload the zip file through cPanel you will want to use file manager and upload it to the public_html file. If you want to place the WordPress in another directory like http://www.yourdomain.com/blog then upload the zip file to public_html/blog/
Step 2: Create the MySQL Databases
Once you log into your cPanel you can select the MySQL icon and make your database. Remember create a database in cPanel has 3 steps:
- Create the database
- Create the user for the database
- Assign the user all privileges to the database
*Remember to write down the database name, user password because they will be needed for the next step.
Step 3: Run the wordpress Install
Since uploaded & extracted the zip file from step 1, if you type out the URL of the direct you installed your blog you should see an installation WordPress screen.
Example:
www.yourdomain.com if WordPress files were uploaded to the root directory of the server.
www.yourdomain.com/blog/ this assumes that you have placed the files a folder called “blog” as a directory.
WordPress will first ask you to create config.php for the WordPress to connect to the database.
Input all of the information for the database and make sure that the database host stays at localhost unless you are connecting to a database remotely then you can enter the IP address or hostname.
database = cpanelusername_databasename
username = cpanelusername_databaseuser
*For security purposes it is some times recommended that you change the database prefix to something else of your choice, but it must have the same format with the _ .
When you have finished all these step then you have successfully installed WordPress. You should get an email that discusses some details regarding your installation.
That’s it! You have just went through the steps of installing WordPress, congratulations. To login your WordPress and get started you can visit the administrative area or the dashboard by doing to one of these 2 links:
http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php
Explore the WordPress dashboard and learn at least what each section contains and has on it, we will be writing more tutorials that explain each wordpress function in detail.
