How to Install WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress is a free, open-source software that is known to be versatile and effortless to install. If you’re here to know how to install WordPress, keep reading. However, this guide is for installing WordPress on a shared hosting and local machine (Windows and Mac). To Install WordPress on VPS, refer to this article.

With that being said, let’s get started!

How to Install WordPress with Auto Installer

Setting up WordPress on Hostinger is a quick and easy process thanks to its one-click installer:

1. Log in to your hPanel and locate the Auto Installer under the Website section.
2. Click on the WordPress icon, fill in the required fields, and click Install.

That’s it! You can now log in to the administrator dashboard by selecting WordPress on the Actions field under the List of Installed Applications and begin creating your website.

How to Install WordPress Manually

If the automatic WordPress installer can’t seem to be working, or that it’s not available in your hosting, you can install WordPress manually:

Preparing the WordPress Installation

Before we begin the installation process, let’s set a few things first:

1. Download and extract the latest version of WordPress.
2. Upload the extracted files to your hosting account by using the File Manager or an FTP Client like FileZilla.
3. Then, log in to your hPanel and go to MySQL Databases under the Databases section. After filling in the required fields, press Create.

Installing WordPress

Now that we got the preparation stage covered, we can proceed with the installation wizard. Access your domain name to open the setup page.

The WordPress 5-minute installation wizard has five steps in total:

1. Select your language and press Continue.
2. WordPress will ask to collect the MySQL details. Since you already have them, press Let’s go!
3. Enter the MySQL database credentials. You may leave the Database Host and the Table Prefix fields as they are. Only change the latter if you wish to run multiple installations inside one database. Click Submit.
4. WordPress will check whether it’s possible to connect to the MySQL database you have created. If there are no errors, select Run the installation.
5. Fill the website and the administrator’s information. Install WordPress to finalize the process.

You can now press the Login button to access the WordPress admin area.

How to Install WordPress Locally

If you install WordPress locally, you will have an awesome environment to test out any changes before implementing them on your live website. Let’s look at the ways to achieve this on Mac and Windows:

Installing WordPress on Mac Using MAMP

To install WordPress locally on a Mac computer, we will be using MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

This tool allows you to create a PHP and MySQL server on your machine. In other words, it provides all the necessary ingredients to run a WordPress environment locally for testing purposes.

Installing MAMP and Creating a Database

Similar to the manual installation on shared hosting, we must prepare the server and the database first:

1. Download and install the latest version of MAMP on your Mac.
2. The installation wizard is quite simple and does not require any custom settings. Proceed until the setup is complete.
3. Create a database by accessing the Database tab.
4. Insert the Name of the new database -> Create. For this example, we’re going to use w0rdpr3ss as our database name.

That’s it! We’re ready to set up WordPress locally on a Mac OS.

Performing WordPress Installation

If you haven’t, download WordPress and extract it. Then, do the following:

1. Move all the files inside the WordPress folder to the default MAMP document root: Applications/MAMP/htdocs.
2. Access the WordPress installation wizard by entering “localhost:8888” in a browser.
3. When prompted for the database and user connection details, enter your Database Name. Then, fill in root as the Username and Password. Click Submit to continue the rest of the steps as before.

Pretty easy, right? Now let’s look at how to do the same thing on Windows!

Installing WordPress on Windows Using WampServer

To install WordPress locally on Windows, we will utilize WampServer instead. As you can probably guess, the name is short for Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Here’s how to set it up:

Installing WampServer and Creating a Database

After downloading the latest WampServer on your computer, follow these steps:

1. Install WampServer. No custom configuration is needed, so you may proceed until it finishes. You’ll only be prompted to choose the default browser and text editor for the server to use.
2. Access WampServer from the taskbar and launch phpMyadmin.
3. In the login screen, enter root as the username. Leave the password blank.
4. Navigate to the Databases tab, enter a name, and Create a new database for your WordPress.

Performing WordPress Installation

Once the preparation is all taken care of, you can proceed to install WordPress by following these steps:

1. Move the WordPress files inside the document root directory of C:/wamp64/www on your computer
2. Open your browser, enter “localhost” on the search bar to open the setup page.
3. Choose the language and fill in the database details when required. Again, use root as the username, but this time, leave the password field empty.

Then, complete the remaining steps, and you’ll have WordPress available on your local Windows machine in no time.

Conclusion

Congratulations! By finishing this tutorial, you have learned how to install WordPress automatically and manually on shared hosting. Also, we’ve learned the steps to install it locally on Mac and Windows machines.

Hopefully, this guide is useful! Leave a comment below and let us know if you have any questions.