WordPress is the most popular CMS for blogging and also known for its easy installation. In most circumstances, installing WordPress is a simple process that takes less than five minutes to complete. In this post, we will guide you through WordPress installation steps for beginners and how to install WordPress manually for more advanced users.
Preparation Before Installing WordPress
Begin your installation by:
- Checking to ensure that you and your web host have the minimum requirements to run WordPress.
- Downloading the most current version of WordPress.
- Unzipping the downloaded file to a folder on your hard drive.
- Creating a secure password for your Secret Key
Automated WordPress Installation for Beginners
If you are not comfortable with renaming files, step 3 is optional and you can skip it as the install program will create the wp-config.php file for you.
- Download and unzip the WordPress package if you haven’t already.
- Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL (or MariaDB) user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
- (Optional) Find and rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, then edit the file (see Editing wp-config.php) and add your database information.
- Upload the WordPress files to the desired location on your web server:
- If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g.http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (excluding the WordPress directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
- If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your website (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), create the blog directory on your server and upload the contents of the unzipped WordPress package to the directory via FTP.
- Note: If your FTP client has an option to convert file names to lower case, make sure it’s disabled.
- Run the WordPress installation script by accessing the URL in a web browser. This should be the URL where you uploaded the WordPress files.
- If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/
- If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/
That’s it! WordPress should now be installed.
Install WordPress in Local
Many of our beginner level users often ask us if they could try WordPress on their computer? The answer is yes, but most beginners should not do that.
The reason why some folks install WordPress in a local server environment is to build themes, plugins, or to test things out.
If you want to run a blog for other people to see, then you do not need to install WordPress in your computer. If you install WordPress locally in your computer, then the only person who can see the site is you.
If you want to make your WordPress site available to the internet (rest of the world), then you need to get a web hosting account and install WordPress by using one of the methods we showed above.
Having that said, if you are really interested in installing WordPress locally on your computer to learn more about theme development, test plugins etc, then we highly encourage you to do so.
If you are using a Windows computer, then we recommend that you download and setup WAMP. If you are using a Mac, then you need to download and setup Mamp.
