As we continue on with our Basics of Blogging series, we have arrived at the topic of installing WordPress on your new website. WordPress is the most-popular content management system, or CMS, in the world, and it is the obvious choice for anyone starting up their own blog. Before you can take this step, be sure that you have followed along with the previous two posts in this series on how to pick a web hosting company, and how to add your domain name to your web host.

Why Use WordPress?

When you first start thinking about building a blog, you will notice that there are plenty of content management systems to pick from – and most of them are free. Yet, despite the presence of many options, it seems that nearly everyone who starts a website chooses to use WordPress. Why is that? Once you get started, you will quickly understand why it has become so popular. The combination of user-friendly features and powerful capabilities is what has made this free platform so incredibly popular and useful for so many people.

With WordPress, you can take a great looking website and present it to the world without knowing how to write a single line of code. You aren’t going to need to dive deep into HTML or CSS or anything else in order to make a great site with WordPress, yet it still has the power to allow your site to include countless different features. We will get farther into some of the features of WordPress in the next post in this series, but rest assured that it is almost certainly going to be the best bet for your needs.

Installing WordPress

If you are going to use WordPress for your website, you will first need to install the application that allows your site to run the WordPress platform. Many new website owners get tripped up at this point, but the process is actually extremely simple and straightforward.

First, you are going to need to login to your web hosting account. Head to the site where you have opened a hosting account, log in, and locate the control panel that you can use to manage the backend of your website. Most web hosting companies use cPanel to manage website administration, so find the link to cPanel through your host and enter any additional credentials, if necessary.

With most hosting companies, you will install WordPress via cPanel.

Once you are in cPanel, you are going to look for a section titled ‘AutoInstallers’. Within that section, there should be a WordPress icon – click on that icon to start the process of installing the WordPress application on your website.

The Details

As you follow along with the step-by-step process of installing WordPress, you should find that everything is pretty much self-explanatory. The process is mostly automated, and you are only going to have to fill in couple of fields before you are all ready to go. Two pieces of information that you are going to need to provide during the setup process are a user name and a password. These credentials will be separate from the user name and password you use to access your hosting account, so be sure to write them down somewhere safe. 

The only other point you need to pay particular attention to at this time is the installation URL. This URL is where you will be able to access your WordPress installation – in other words, it is where you will be able to do the actual editing of your site. Often, the installation URL is ‘yourdomain.com/wp-admin’ or something similar, but be sure to write yours down (and bookmark it) so it is always close at hand.

Overall, the installation process for WordPress is about as easy as you could expect. In just a few minutes, you can have WordPress live on your website and you can begin building exactly the site you have in mind for your visitors to enjoy. Thanks to the flexibility of this impressive CMS, the site you create can take on just about any form or function that you desire.

In the final post of our Basics of Blogging series, we are going to look at some of the basics of using WordPress, including choosing a theme, setting up a menu, and more. Thank you for reading!