This part of the series is going to be a bit more technical, as it involves installing a website management platform – WordPress. However, it’s nothing difficult, and we’re confident anyone can handle the tasks described here.
First things first, WordPress is the most popular website management platform available. It’s free, powerful, and quite easy to use. On top of that, Google enjoys the way WordPress structures its content, which is often reflected in the rankings.
(The previous part of the series was all about setting up your hosting account. You need to have a hosting account before you can install WordPress.)
There are two main ways to install WordPress:
1. The “Fantastico” Way
Fantastico is a very handy tool that allows you to install WordPress quickly, without having to worry about most of the technical details of the process.
If your hosting account operates on the cPanel platform then you can find Fantastico in your admin section.
Inside Fantastico, just click on “WordPress” in the left sidebar and then on “New Installation” in the center area.
Fantastico will then ask for some basic details of your site. Things like:
- the domain where you want to install WordPress,
- your admin account access details,
- your email,
- site name (will be used in the header of your new site),
- and other info that’s not mandatory.
Once you click “Install WordPress” and then “Finish Installation,” Fantastico will do its magic.
That’s all when it comes to working with Fantastico. However, not every platform enables this tool. Sometimes you’ll have to perform the installation manually.
2. The Manual Way
Luckily, installing WordPress manually isn’t much more time-consuming than doing it through Fantastico.
Start by going to wordpress.org and downloading the latest version of the platform.
Then unzip the package and upload everything via FTP to your hosting account (you can get the FTP connection details in your hosting account’s admin panel). Make sure to upload the files to the correct directory – the one pointed out as the root directory for your domain name (your web host can assist you with that).
Once you’re done just try to visit your website through a web browser. This is what you’ll likely see:
Just click the big button and begin the installation process.
In the next step, WordPress will inform you to prepare all the important connection details like:
In order to get them, you have to create a database on your hosting account. This can be done through the admin panel (image below), or by contacting the support team.
Proceed as follows: (1) create new database, (2) add new user, (3) add user to database (image below).
Once you have all this, you can continue installing WordPress.
The final step is to pick your admin account and set your admin email. Also, make sure to check the checkbox at the bottom of the screen.
After clicking the big button, your site is fully installed.
Setting Permalinks
One more thing we want to mention here are the initial permalinks settings.
Permalinks represent the structure of every URL on your site. Unfortunately, the default settings are not that SEO-friendly. You’re a lot better off changing them to the following (you can find this in the Settings > Permalinks section).
At this point you can start searching for a nice theme and some cool plugins. But we’ll talk about that in the next parts of this series.