Setting up WordPress
In this lesson you will learn about domains, hosting and installing WordPress on your own server. This is the wordpress.org route and the preferred option for anyone who wants more flexibility and control over their WordPress installation. This option also requires you provide more stuff, like a domain and hosting plan, and a good working knowledge of web servers and basic coding skills. Don’t worry if you are not in that category yet, by the end of this course you will be.
At this point you should have a good understanding 0f the differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. If not, please review the lesson WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
Domain Name
A domain name is basically a web site address. For example, learningglue.com is the address of the Learning Glue Web site; it’s also the site’s domain name.
Domain names are managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It authorises domain name registrars to register and reassign domains. It is one of these registrars that you will facilitate the purchase and registration of your domain name. Domain registration is different from domain hosting, and we will discuss hosting a little later.
Some things to keep in mind when considering domain names:
- Keep It Short! The longer your URL is the harder it will be to remember, and the more likely people will misspell it.
- Make it Easy to Remember. A string of six random letters might be really short, but it’s not easy to remember. Your domain name has to stick in people’s minds in order for them to remember it, and to tell others about it.
- Consider your Brand. If you already have a brand name you really need to find a URL that works with your brand. People will try to type in the name of your company with a .com at the end anyway, so you might as well go with it.
- Use Keywords. Using search terms as part of your domain name can increase your search engine rankings and increase the chances of people finding your site. They need to fit into the name naturally, though. For example, WebDesign.com includes the common search term “web design,” assisting it in organic search engine ranking. What keywords would people search under in order to find your type of business? Can you work one or more of them into your domain name without it sounding too awkward?
- Be Relevant and Descriptive. It helps if your domain name describes what your site does in some way. It doesn’t have to be descriptive (Amazon, Google and Yahoo are all good examples), but it makes it that much easier, especially if you’re not Amazon, Google or Yahoo.
- How Does It Sound? Say your URL out loud—is it clear how to spell it? If someone tells a friend the URL over the phone would they have to spell it out? If you did a radio ad would it be perfectly clear how to spell it?
- Avoid Numbers. Numbers in a domain name can be very confusing. It is never clear if the numbers should be written out or not: 7 or seven?
- Avoid Homophones. A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning, and may differ in spelling. These can quickly confuse your potential audience and when someone is confused, they usually just move on to the next thing – such as your competitor’s site. Examples of typical homophones are:
- 4 or for?
- There, their or they’re?
- Your or you’re?
- To, too or two?
- Consider Misspellings. Beware of words that are easily misspelled. If you do use them, buy the URL with the misspellings and redirect users to the correct URL.
- It’s Dot Com. Stick with the top level domains, like .com for businesses and .org for nonprofits. There are all kinds of other options out there, such as .biz, .info, .tv, and .xyz but they’re just not as accepted and people are likely to type .com anyway. If you do use one of the other types of domain names, make sure you are using it for a specific purpose or for a specific geography like .ie if you are an Irish company with Irish customers.
- Ask Other People. It’s easy to think you have a killer domain name and overlook the fact that it could easily mean something else. Getting a different perspective can save you some embarrassment.
- Try to Avoid Hard to Read Letters. Certain letters next to each other can be hard to read, depending on the font, like l and i (lilili) and m, n and r (mnrmnrmnr) or v and w (vwvwv).
- Buy What You Need. If the URL you love is taken you can always make the current owner an offer. It will cost you more money, but it can be worth it in the end. And it might be less expensive than you think. Spend some time brainstorming and come up with lots of ideas. If you have a few you like, it might be worth registering them all just in case. There’s nothing worse than spending weeks debating a domain name, finally deciding and discovering that someone beat you to it.
- However you get there, you need a strong URL that works. It can be something practical that just does the job, or it can be something memorable that helps your site spread. Re-branding your site later on can be challenging, so choose wisely the first time.
Once you have researched your domain name and have a shortlist of possibilities, visit one of the many domain registrars to see if it is available. Some of the better known registrars are:
Be sure to shop around as prices can vary considerably as illustrated in the following table of prices at the time of writing this lesson (February 2018).
Registrar | .com | .net | .org | .co | .xyz | .club |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
GoDaddy | $11.99 | $11.99 | $7.99 | $11.99 | $0.99 | $9.99 |
Namecheap | $10.69 | $12.88 | $12.48 | $6.88 | – | $0.88 |
Enom | $13.95 | $16.57 | $14.75 | $32.50 | $12.99 | $19.99 |
OVH | £6.11 | £9.99 | £8.78 | £20.39 | £0.99 | £9.99 |
1and1 | $0.99 | $8.99 | $0.99 | $6.99 | $9.99 | $3.99 |
Domain.com | $9.99 | $10.99 | $14.99 | $11.99 | $14.99 | $10.99 |
Register.com | $8.88 | $11.41 | $10.23 | $26.00 | - | - |
DreamHost | $11.95 | $13.95 | $13.95 | $24.95 | $2.95 | $19.99 |
SiteGround | $14.95 | $14.95 | $14.95 | $29.95 | $12.95 | $14.95 |
Some domain registrars offer domain hosting too, this means that you can get you domain and host it in the same place – a good idea if you get a better deal or there is some other incentive like a free domain with hosting. Let’s talk about hosting next.
Hosting
Web hosting is essentially housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more websites. Simply put, you rent space on a computer to hold your website.
Your host, the computer where your website files are physically stored, assigns an address (DNS or Domain Name Servers) for your files to your domain name so that anyone can find your website on the Internet by typing in your domain name.
There are quite a few things to consider when choosing a hosting company. A poor choice here and no matter how great your site is it won’t ever perform up to its potential.
Before you start looking around for hosting options, it would be a worthwhile exercise to ask yourself the following questions to help you understand what your current and potential requirements are:
- How much server space do you need? Think about what kind of content you are likely to be serving. Will it be mostly web pages or will you need to serve HD video and photos, perhaps large documents?
- Will you need a lot of control over your server and access to the back-end? Some hosting providers restrict access to the server back-end for security and stability reasons. Trust us that you will need FTP access to your files at the very minimum.
- How much traffic do you, or will you, get? If you are looking at a few hundred a month then you will have a lot more choice than if your traffic could be thousands daily.
- How critical is it that your site is up all the time? Can you manage occasional outages or are you running an eCommerce site that cannot function without 100% up-time?
- Is there anything out of the norm that you site needs?
Having answers to all of these questions will make the task of choosing a provider much easier.
There a several different hosting options available to you. Some providers will have all options while others may only have some.
Shared Hosting
This is typically the cheapest and most attractive for those with small, low traffic sites. A shared hosting plan will position your site on the same machine as many other sites. It’s a little like renting a single room in a very large apartment building with shared facilities.
Financially this is a great option, it will always be the cheapest. But the downside is that your site can be affected by other sites on the same server. Since you are all using the same RAM, Hard Disk, and so on, you are all competing for those resources. One of your neighbours is running a resource hungry site then everyone on the same server could be losing out.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
VPS is a step up from shared hosting even though your site is still physically sharing space with other sites. The trick here is that software is used to create a virtual private space around your site, which reduces the impact that other sites many have on yours.
Dedicated Hosting
This is where you, and you alone, are the sole resident of your own server. You are not sharing space with other sites and you will have complete access to all the resources provided by the server. With this option you are not going to be negatively impacted by other sites but you will pay a higher price.
Cloud Hosting
This is a way of spreading your site over multiple servers, sharing the load so to speak. This option is excellent for sites that cannot suffer from downtime, as the likelihood that servers in different locations going offline at the same time is very remote. The cost of cloud hosting is generally higher that any of the other options discussed here.
So which option do you choose? Well, this really depends on the answers to the questions we posed earlier in this section. Think traffic volumes, downtime, features, control, etc. Since we are talking about WordPress web site, another consideration should be that you hosting provider is WordPress friendly and perhaps offers one click WordPress installs.
Once you have decided on your hosting provider it’s time to move onto installation!
Installation
Before you can perform a manual install you will need be have and do a few things:
- Access to your web server (typically FTP)
- Ability to create MySQL databases
- A text editor (we recommend notepad++)
- An FTP Client (we recommend filezilla)
- Your web browser of choice (we like Chrome)
We can divide methods of WordPress installation into two broad categories:
- A simple 1-click install
- Self install
The former, a the name suggests, is the easiest method. With this option, your hosting provider will provide you with some options like which domain name use if you have a multiple domain hosting situation, which folder to install WordPress to, etc., nothing too taxing. Once you have made some installation decisions it will be a case of clicking one button and they will install WordPress and create the required databases. Once installation is complete you will be notified and can start the configuration process.
The latter is more involved and less common with good hosting providers but we will work through the process step by step just in case you find yourself needed to perform a manual install.
1: Download WordPress
Start by downloading the latest WordPress package from http://wordpress.org/download/. This will download a single compressed (.zip) file, save this on your local machine.
Next unzip the downloaded file to a folder on your local machine.
While your’e waiting have a go at this mini-quiz:
[WATU 3]
2: Upload WordPress to Hosting Account
The best way to upload your WordPress to your hosting account is with FTP. We use and recommend filezilla for FTP. Many hosting providers have web based FTP clients of their own.
Typically, and we recommend, you place these files within the root directory. But you can also place the files within another folder like “wp” or “site” if you wanted to keep WordPress separate from other files and folders on your server.
3: Create MySQL Database and User
WordPress is a database driven CMS, meaning all data is stored in a database. Specifically, this database is a MySQL database so be sure that your hosting includes the ability to create and edit MySQL databases.
Your hosting provider will have a web based interface for managing your databases, the most popular are Plesk, cPanel or phpMyAdmin.
Using the provided interface, login and create a new database called wordpress.
Next, create a new user and choose a name that makes it clear that this is a wordpress user, simply wordpress is a good choice. Then choose a password for your user, something secure using a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Now edit the privileges for the user you have just created ensuring that this user has full privileges for your wordpress database.
Step 4: Configure wp-config.php
Within your WordPress you’ll find a file called wp-config-sample.php. This file contains database information required by WordPress to understand which database to interact with.
First, rename wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php (essentially remove -sample). Then open the file in your code editor and locate the following:
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here'); /** MySQL database username */ define('DB_USER', 'username_here'); /** MySQL database password */ define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');
Now edit the file:
- Replace database_name_here with the name of the database you created.
- Replace username_here with the username of the database you created.
- Replace password_here with the password of the database that you created.
Now save, close and upload the file back to your server.
Step 5: Run the Installation Script
Now open a new browser window and navigate to the installation page to run the installation script. The script is called install.php and you will find it in the wp-admin folder. A typical URL might be:
https://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
Of course replacing example.com with your actual domain name.
You should now see a welcome page that says “Welcome to the famous five minute WordPress installation process!”
Step 6: Complete the Installation
On this page, fill in the fields for:
- Site Name
- Username
- Password (needs to be entered twice)
- Email address (login information will be sent to this email address)
Also, select whether or not to have the search engines index the site. Then click Install Now, and you should be taken to the final screen with the wordpress login prompt displayed.
If you are experience any difficulties during installation, refer to the wordpress.org excellent installation support pages for troubleshooting assistance:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
Summary
In this lesson you learned all about setting up your own WordPress application. We covered domain names and hosting in great detail to help you make good decisions for your site. We also covered the manual installation process that you may need to perform if your hosting provider does not provide 1-click installs.