Installing WordPress is the most common thing in the hosting world and thousands of people are doing it every day. Most of them however, are doing it with auto-installers like Softaculous and Fantastico. It is way easier and faster than installing it manually, sometimes you just don’t have the option and have to go the manual way for a number of reasons. To help you with that I will share with you my guide on how to install WordPress manually.
The manual installation of WordPress is also quite easy to do and basically includes similar steps to the transferring of WordPress tutorial we covered a few weeks back. You would have to upload the installation files onto your hosting server, create a database and run the installer which will populate the database and configure the needed settings.
So first, let’s start by downloading the installation files from WordPress.org. This should be pretty straightforward, just go to the site and download the latest version of the CMS.
Using FTP to upload the files onto your hosting environment is probably the most common way as all hosting companies provide it as an option. You can of course use a file uploading tool of your hosting’s control panel.
For hosts like WebHostFace which use cPanel, this tool is called File Manager and might be easier than FTP as you don’t need to use another program to complete the process. You can just log into your cPanel, open the File Manager, navigate to the desired folder and upload the files with one click. Either way, after uploading the installation archive into the desired folder, all you have to do is extract it.
*Note: The installation archive includes a folder called “wordpress” which holds the installation files, you would have to move them from it to the parent folder if you want use a URL like yourdomain.com. If you don’t move them, your WordPress website will be opened from a URL like yourdomain.com/wordress.
The next step is to create a database and a database user, depending on the host, you will have different tools to accomplish that. In the case of WebHostFace you can use the MySQL Database Wizard in your cPanel to create a new database, database user and password. You can fill in any database name, user and password but write them down somewhere as we are going to need them later. Give all privileges over the database to the user you have created and after everything is ready, navigate with your browser to the URL where your new WordPress installation is located (i.e. yourdomain.com)
Navigating to your new WordPress URL in the browser will open the Setup Configuration File and there are a few steps you would have to follow in order to complete the installation. The first one is to choose the language you are going to use for your site, pick the one you want and press Continue.
On the next step, you will be given more information about the installation and details you would need to complete it. Since you have created a new database already, you should have everything needed and should just press Let’s go!
What comes next is the submitting the database info. Just enter the database name, user and password in the corresponding fields and leave database host and table prefix as they are: localhost and wp_.
If the information is correct, you will get a confirmation message and a prompt to Run the install.
The last step is to enter the login information about the administrative user of the website. This would ask for a Site name, Username, Password and E-mail, when you are ready, press Install WordPress.
That is it, WordPress has been installed and you should have received a Success messages which prompts you to log into your newly installed WordPress site, congratulations.
I hope this detailed guide was helpful to you, feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback in the comment section below. Any questions are welcome as well and don’t forget that if you are a client of ours, we can install WordPress and other applications free of charge in a manner of minutes for you, just contact us for more information.
