WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular website development and maintenance platform in the whole world today. Not only is it free to use and open-source, but it’s also simple and can be used to develop any kind of website. It has a vibrant community, a plethora of themes, and plugins that are easy to manage, and is SEO friendly.
This article will introduce you to WordPress and will provide a step-by-step guide for Installing WordPress application and using it for your business. It will also list down the best practices that you must follow to remove or prevent errors during this installation. Furthermore, the article will explain the various benefits of Installing WordPress. Read along to learn more about WordPress and try out the installation process yourself!
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
You must ensure the following before Installing WordPress for your business:
- An email address you have access to, WordPress will send important emails, password reset instructions, etc. on this email.
- A domain name that will run your website using WordPress. During installation, WordPress will use this name to initialize some of your folders/headers/settings, but if you don’t have it you can specify this later.
- If you wish to run your website on HTTPS and already have an SSL certificate in your website’s name, remember where you have stored it. While installing you can specify the protocol as HTTPS and give your SSL certificate. The WordPress engine will use the key contained in this certificate to encrypt the information your website sends on the web.
- WordPress prefers that you use the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, or MariaDB, the software on which WordPress runs. At the time of writing this article, the latest versions are 7.4 for PHP, 5.6 for MySQL, 10.1 for MariaDB. The latest version for WordPress is 5.8, though 5.6 is the most popular version.
- A password and username, which are thought off, will be used as your login into the WordPress Administrator section.
- Good FTP software and a text editor of your choice.
Introduction to WordPress
Image Source
WordPress provides a simple and hassle-free approach for promoting your business on the web. It provides a lot more functionalities than its peer tools and yet is one of the simplest online tools to use.
WordPress is a robust Content Management System (CMS) that entrepreneurs use to market their products and sell their services to potential customers. You can publish your written content, rank higher in search engines, and also create business websites for your online store using this tool. It is free open-source software that can enable your Development Teams to build Multiple Plugins, Widgets, and Themes.
WordPress is popular for its rich feature set and users find it adaptable to new technologies. Moreover, WordPress allows you to customize its features to suit your business needs and update and change your content without any issues. It operates on a flexible architecture that supports you to manage multiple business transactions at the same time seamlessly.
To learn more about WordPress, visit here.
Steps for Installing WordPress
Though there are many automated tools for Installing WordPress, like QuickInstall/Fantastico, however, this section will delve a bit deeper and see how to Install WordPress manually for optimal usage. The following steps will help you in Installing WordPress:
Step 1: Download and Unzip the WordPress Application
The first step of Installing WordPress, requires you to download the release version of your choice from here.
Next, you need to Unzip it, but before you do that, take a moment to decide where you would like to install WordPress. e.g. If you just want to run a blog on your existing website using WordPress, just create a subfolder inside your webroot, and unzip WordPress in it.
Else, if you wish to make a new website or run your whole website using WordPress, unzip it in your webroot folder. The “webroot” here is the folder whose contents will be served by your web server, it’s specified while installing the webserver.
It could be something like “var/www” or “/usr/local/apache” on Linux, or if you are on Windows, the default could be something like “C:inetpubwwwroot”.
Your unzipped WordPress 5.6.6 folder will look like the below image.
Image Source: Self
Step 2: Create Tables in WordPress
Next, WordPress needs to create some tables for its internal use, in your database server. Your database access details will be read from the “wp-config.php” file.
You can either enter these details manually or wait till WordPress itself asks for them. To specify these details, just open wp-admin/install.php in your browser, this page will take you through the process to set up a wp-config.php file with your database connection details.
If it does not open up, just use your preferred text editor to open wp-config-sample.php, and specify your database access details as shown in the below image.
Image Source: Self
This file contains a sample configuration, you just need to change your host-specific information, keep all other things as they are. Lastly, rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, and save it. You can find fine-grained instructions, for advanced users here.
Step 3: Install and Run the Database Script
After saving the “wp-config.php” file, run the install script by visiting “/wp-admin/install.php” on your browser.
e.g. www.YourWebsite.com/wp-admin/install.php, if you want to install in the webroot or www.YourWebsite.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php if you want to install it in a subfolder.
WordPress will first ask you your preferred language. This is shown in the below image.
Image Source: Self
Step 4: Fill the Database Details
WordPress will now create the tables it needs for its functioning, set up folders, and links, and install extensions and packages it needs.
In case you skipped or missed specifying your database access details, WordPress will explicitly ask you to fill them as shown in the below image.
Image Source: Self
Step 5: Finish Installing WordPress
If the database details provided were good, and everything else till now is fine you will see a message similar to the one below.
This message that your process of Installing WordPress is complete. Now, all you need to do is set up your id and password.
Step 6: Set up your Username & Password
WordPress will then ask you for a username/password, which will be used to protect the WordPress administrator section. Also, You can specify if you want to “Discourage search engines from indexing your website”. This is shown in the below image.
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Most people leave this box unchecked, check it only if you want general users to access your blogs/pages, but do not want search engines to index your webpages. Finally, you will see the successful installation message similar to the one shown in the below image.
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Just below the successful installation message, you will see the “Log In” button, clicking it will take you to the WordPress administrator login screen.
That’s it! You have completed the process of Installing WordPress and now you can nstart using it.
Best Practices for Installing WordPress
You can certain challenges while Installing WordPress on your system. The following best practices will hep you overcome these issues:
- If, while Installing WordPress, you see a lot of error messages related to some headers or extensions not being found, just check your “Wp-config.php“ file, it must start with a “<?php” and end with a “?>”. Also, the WordPress users must have sufficient permissions to access the subfolders it requires.
- If you see some database-related errors. Make sure you’ve granted your WordPress user, permission to access your WordPress database. Make sure your MySQL instance is running.
- If you see the message “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress“, make sure that your web server has the plugin/extension that connects WordPress with the locally running MySQL database.
- If your WordPress instance is not able to upload larger files, like videos, try increasing the memory limits in the “.user.ini” file. e.g. upload_max_filesize = 256M, post_max_size = 256M.
- If CPU/memory intensive processes fail or take a very long time or make the server unresponsive; set a higher memory limit ( memory allocated to a PHP process) and a higher CPU execution time limit or max_execution_time (the maximum time in seconds a script is allowed to run before it is terminated by the parser) e.g. memory_limit = 1024M, ax_execution_time = 6000.
Benefits of Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress and using it for your business has the following benefits:
- Free to Use: Using WordPress is 100% free. You can download its application and design your Websites and blogs without spending even a single penny. However, you need to host WordPress either on your own system or through a 3rd party. If you are hiring a 3rd party to host WordPress then you need to pay their server charges and security fee.
- Supports SEO: WordPress is designed using semantic markup language and is a Search ENgine friendly tool. Installing WordPress will provides you simple features to implement SEO tools in your content to rank it higher on search engines like Google. Another advantage of WordPress is that you can directly update your published content, unlike other tools where you may need to pay the extra costs and spend long hours to get your change in place. You can even modify your plugins and themes, in a matter of seconds.
- Appealing Themes: A Website needs to be engaging if you wish to bring more business through it. Themes play a key role in making your Website attractive. Your Website’s face, style, structure, and all the parts which are appealing to your audience, depending on the theme that you use for the website. WordPress offers you a wide array of themes showcasing different styles and layouts. These themes are easy to customize without writing any new code. Moreover, certain themes are free in WordPress while the rest of them falls under the Premium category. The premium themes are built for professional uses and contain additional features like SEO, Supporting Mobile view, etc. You can utilize the Premium Themes for a price range of $30 to $80 depending upon your requirements.
- Huge Support Community: WordPress being a popular open-source platform, has given rise to numerous communities all over the world. They actively support this tool and contribute to its growth. This provides new users an easy solution to get their queries sorted by experienced users. Furthermore, there are numerous tutorials and youtube videos available on the internet that you will never find yourself at a loss of resources or information.
Conclusion
This article introduced you to WordPress and listed the steps that will support you in Installing WordPress manualy for your business. The article further discussed the best practice that you must follow during this installation. It also explained the various benefits that you can experience by Installing WordPress for your work.
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Pratik writes about various topics related to data industry who loves creating engaging content on topics like data analytics, machine learning, AI, big data, and business intelligence.