Having previously set up your new website and domain in part 1, we’re now ready to install WordPress.
Go to wordpress.org and click the Download button. Extract the WordPress files from the downloaded file into a folder on your computer.
Now we can use FTP to upload the WordPress files. Connect to your website using your FTP program. On the remote site, you need to make sure that the WordPress files are all uploaded in to your “public” or “public_html” folder. Check with your hosting provider what this should be.
Once that’s done, go back to your website, and you should see something like this:-
Go ahead and click the button to create a configuration file.
You should then get a message telling you that you need a database. Click the Let’s go button and the following should appear:-
Well, we don’t know any of this, since we haven’t yet created a database. To be precise, you need to create a MySQL database, which is the database engine used by WordPress. Check with your hosting provider on how to do this.
Creating the Database
When creating the database, make sure to give it a name like “mywebsite_wp7a35f”, rather than the default “wordpress”. The “mywebsite” tells us what website the database is for, the “wp” tell us it’s a WordPress database and the random characters added at the end make it hard for anyone to guess the complete database name.
Next we need a new username to log into the database. For the database username, choose another set of characters, but not the same as the database name and also not the same as your FTP username you created before.
For the database password, again choose a random selection of numbers and digits, adding some symbols too.
You also need to find out your hosting provider’s database server or “host”. This is often “localhost”, which means it’s on the same machine as the website itself. However some companies store their databases on separate computers. In this case, it will be an IP address.
So to summarise, you should have a database server (host), database name, a username and a password.
Continuing the installation
Now we have done all that, we can return to the WordPress installation.
You can now fill in the four fields with the database name, username, password and database host. Table Prefix can be left as it is.
Click the Submit button, and if everything works you should get the following message:-
Go ahead and click the button to complete the installation.
If all proceeds successfully, it will now ask you for a login to your WordPress site. Yes, yet another login! Once again, this should be completely different from the ones you have used so far. Just to re-iterate, choose something not obvious, not ‘admin’ or your name, but some sequence of letters and numbers. You can leave the password blank this time if you want, and WordPress will automatically generate one for you.
Enter your email address and leave the privacy box checked.
Click the button, and WordPress will complete the installation.
Once finished, it will display the username you chose and the password it generated for you. Make a note of these two pieces of information somewhere safe.
Click the Log In button, and enter the same username and password.
Congratulations, you’ve just installed WordPress!
Under Construction
To round things off, we’ll now add an “Under Construction” page to WordPress so that anyone visiting your website will see that, rather than your unfinished blog.
Over on the left hand side of the WordPress dashboard, click Plugins.
Then click Add New, and in the search box type “Under Construction” and click the Search Plugins button. You want to select the plugin called underConstruction by Jeremy Massel. Click the button to install it.
Once installed, click the Activate Plugin button. This activates the plugin for use on your website, but it doesn’t activate the under construction page itself. So go to the plugin, and then activate the Under Construction page. Then click the Save Changes button at the bottom.
If you now logout of WordPress, you should see the under construction page.
And that’s it, your site is all ready to add content to and configure, and any visitor won’t be able to see anything until you’re good and ready.
Well done! That’s the hard bit over. In the next part we’ll go through how to add your first post.