One of the most important last steps before launching your website is configuring its SEO settings. Using an SEO plugin such as Rank Math is an excellent option. It offers a step-by-step process that guides you in achieving better SEO scores using helpful tips and suggestions. Next, you’ll describe the page you’d like to create (1), provide Divi AI with any additional information (2), and choose fonts and colors (3).

Once you’ve selected an option, click the ‘Next’ button. The tools section of the dashboard offer features to manage and maintain your site. Once you have signed up for hosting, you can follow our step-by-step guide on how to move WordPress from a local server to a live site.

How to Install WordPress on a Self-Hosted Website: Everything You Need to Know

Additionally, you might need to use a plugin to cache pages for faster delivery or even switch to a more reliable WordPress hosting provider. We’ve covered what plugins are elsewhere in our Resource Center. To sum them up briefly, they’re add-ons that can add new features and functionality for WordPress. If you’re still itching to tweak elements of your website or add new styling options, you can also customize your theme’s Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file. This is where all of the instructions for how things look on your site are stored.

• It’s free to use and includes all the features any website owner could need.
• At some point you may want to publish your local website to the internet, so other people can see it.
• However, if you want to start a WordPress blog for other people to see, then you do not need to install WordPress on your computer.
• Have fun exploring these — and use the links down the left-hand side to see what you can do with WordPress, like creating blog posts.

WordPress is officially installed and you can log in to your WordPress dashboard to start managing your site. Web hosting changes that and makes the WordPress software (and by consequence, your website) accessible to anyone who knows your domain name. For most people, the easiest way to install WordPress is via your web hosting. This is the absolute best option for beginners, which is why we’re going to focus most of this tutorial on that topic. We have a beginner’s step by step guide on how to install WordPress plugins. The visual appearance of your WordPress powered website is controlled by Themes.

Step 4. Optimize your settings

Finally, there are a handful of checklist items you’ll want to look for with any theme. When evaluating themes, it’s a good idea to create a ‘must have’ list. If customization and flexibility are important, make sure the theme has enough options to suit your needs. Once you’ve installed WordPress, you’re well on your way with your blogging (or website-owning) journey. Switching to a different theme doesn’t change your actual content (you won’t lose any of your posts and pages) — it just changes how things look.

You’ll have a fully functioning WordPress install that you can play around with, it just won’t be accessible to anyone else. If you can’t find the WordPress login page, check out our guide to finding the WordPress login URL. For Protocol, if you’re using an SSL certificate, you should choose HTTPS.

Final Thoughts on WordPress for Beginners

With this information and your plan, it’s time to install WordPress. Then, go through the setup process to install the Local software on your computer just like you would any other software. Your site will function just like a normal WordPress website, but you’ll be the only one who can access it.

That means learning how to work with text, images, and videos. WordPress offers you two ways to present wordpress how to use it your home page. By default, your site’s home page will be a list of your most recent blog posts.

How to Use WordPress: The Guide

If you want to add further functionality, such as to optimize images or increase your site’s security, you can always turn to plugins. Once you’ve used the page builder and are happy with your form, you’ll have the option to Save and Embed it. We recommend saving your form and going back to your Contact page. With the Block editor, you can easily choose “WPForms” from the list of blocks, and then select the form you want to embed on your page. First, you can use the same adaptable and user-friendly publishing system that many internationally-known brands and publications use. What’s more, WordPress is always free to download and has many free plugins and themes to offer that you can use to enhance your website.

Congratulations, you’ve now installed WordPress on your Bluehost hosting account. The database name will be the one that you entered in the previous step. The username will be ‘root’, and you can leave the password field blank. You can also leave the database host and table prefix as-is. Simply enter the username and password you entered earlier when setting up the local website and then click the ‘Log In’ button. Installing WordPress locally on your computer gives you a testing environment that doesn’t affect your live website or blog.

A managed hosting account is basically a concierge service for your WordPress website. You have successfully installed WordPress on your SiteGround hosting account. To log into your new site’s admin area, simply click on the ‘My Sites’ tab in the Bluehost dashboard. Then, find your site and click on its ‘Manage site’ button. Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world.

Unless you purposefully installed an SSL Certificate, the default is HTTP. Autoinstallers basically automate the full WordPress install process that I’ll outline in the next section. So instead of needing to do everything manually, you just input some basic information, click a button, and the autoinstaller installs WordPress for you. However, one plugin that will work with absolutely any type of hosting and will surely boost your website’s speed is Autoptimize. WordPress powers more than 40% of all websites because of its versatility. The base functionality is great, but the ability to install plugins takes it to the next level.

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If you forgot any of that information, login to cPanel and click on MySQL databases. On this page, you can see the names of your database and username as well as the ability to reset the password. Ask if your host uses localhost as the database host value. If none of this works, try deleting the database and walk through the MySQL database wizard again.