Voosh Themes

How To Complete A Fresh Wordpress Install

This is the fourth part of A Beginner’s Guide to Wordpress – in part three I focused on the essential tools you need to create a new Wordpress site. In this post I discuss how to complete a clean Wordpress install – it’s something that can seem complicated at first if you haven’t used Wordpress before, but once you know what you’re doing it’s quick and simple.

There are two primary ways in which Wordpress can be installed – these include via your web host’s control panel (if they provide that facility) or manually yourself using the Wordpress installer. It may also be worth installing a local copy that you can use for testing before uploading changes to your live site. All of these approaches are discussed further below.

1. Auto Install From Your Web Host’s Control Panel

Due to the increased popularity of Wordpress, many web host providers now offer auto-install functions that make the installation process a breeze. You can see a list of these web hosts at http://wordpress.org/hosting. This is probably the simplest way to install Wordpress – all it requires is that you log into your web host’s control panel and find where they store their auto-installers.

Once you’ve found the Wordpress installer, you’ll probably need to complete a couple of short forms, and then that’s it – Wordpress will be installed! Another advatange of this approach is that if you run into any problems you can contact your web host’s support team who should hopefully be able to fix any issues if you run into problems.

One other thing – if you do decide to use an auto-installer it’s a good idea to check the version of Wordpress that is being installed – you want to ensure that it’s the latest version to avoid any potential security vulnerabilities that may not have been fixed with older versions.

2. Install Yourself Using The Wordpress Installer

Another approach to installing Wordpress is to do it yourself – this is also a very quick and simple process, and you have more control over what you’re doing. You might also want to use this approach if you’re having problems with the auto-install that your web host provides, or if the version they have available is too old.

The basic process involves downloading the latest version of Wordpress at www.wordpress.org, uploading the Wordpress core files to your web server, creating a database, editing the wp-config.php file to tell Wordpress about your database, and then running the Wordpress installer.

This is a very quick process – I’m not going to go into specific details as there are already some great guides out there that explain everything sufficiently well. For instance, there is the famous 5 minute guide which shows you how to complete the installation in series of easy steps.

You might also want to check the main instruction page provided by Wordpress which also contains some useful information.

3. Installing A Local Copy of Wordpress

Another option is to install Wordpress on your local computer – this is ideal for testing plugins and different themes before updating your live site.

Changing themes and plugins can sometimes have a major impact on your site and can cause display problems or much more serious issues. It’s therefore important to test updates locally before making any changes.

Visit this page for more information on how to install Wordpress locally for a range of different platforms.

Conclusion

That’s it for part four! The speed and ease of installing Wordpress and being able to get a new site up and running so quickly is arguably one of its main selling points. And once you’ve done it a few times it will become second nature and you’ll be able to complete installations in matter of minutes. In part five I’m going to discuss some of the main concepts related to a Wordpress site – in particular, things like posts, pages, themes, plugins, widgets, tags, and categories.

Table Of Contents

1. What Makes Wordpress So Great?
2. Understanding How Wordpress Works
3. Five Essential Things You Need For Building A Wordpress Blog
4. How To Complete A Fresh Wordpress Install
5. Wordpress Posts, Pages, And Other Concepts
6. Seven Points To Consider When Choosing A New Wordpress Theme
7. Ten Free Wordpress Plugins That You Should Install