How to install WordPress

Installing WordPress is the first real step between an idea and a live website, and the method you choose shapes how much maintenance you inherit later. The software itself is free and open source, but it has to live somewhere — which means a hosting account, a domain, and a few decisions that are far easier to make correctly now than to unwind in six months. Most people will finish a WordPress installation in under ten minutes. The ones who struggle are usually fighting a host that was the wrong fit from the start.

There are three practical routes: a one-click installer supplied by the host, a manual installation over FTP, and a local installation on your own machine for testing. Each has a legitimate use. The one-click route suits almost every new site. Manual installation matters when a host offers no installer, when a site is being moved, or when the installer has failed and left a half-built database behind. Local installation is for learning and for testing changes that must never touch a live site.

What You Need Before Installing WordPress

Three things have to exist before the installation begins: a hosting account with PHP and MySQL available, a domain name pointed at that host, and access credentials for whichever control panel the host provides. Nearly every host covered below includes a free domain for the first year on annual terms, which removes a separate purchase from the process.

The technical requirements are modest. WordPress runs on PHP 7.4 or later, with PHP 8.1 and above recommended, alongside MySQL or MariaDB. Every provider listed in this guide meets that standard by default, so the requirement rarely becomes a decision point. What does become a decision point is storage, traffic allowance, and the renewal price — the last of which catches more people than the first two combined.

Method 1: One-Click Installation Through Your Host

This is the default path and the correct one for most sites. Hosts build WordPress installers directly into their control panels, and the entire process runs without touching a file manager or a database.

1. Log in to your hosting control panel.
2. Locate the WordPress or Auto Installer section. On cPanel hosts this is often Softaculous; on Hostinger it sits in hPanel, on SiteGround in Site Tools, on Bluehost in the main dashboard.
3. Select the domain or subdomain for the installation.
4. Set the site title, administrator username, and a strong password. Avoid “admin” as the username — it is the first value every brute-force script tries.
5. Enter an administrator email address you actually monitor. Password resets and critical security notices go here.
6. Confirm the install and wait. Most finish in under sixty seconds.
7. Log in at yourdomain.com/wp-admin using the credentials just created.

The installer handles database creation, the wp-config.php file, and table setup silently. If the host offers a staging environment, create one now rather than later — testing plugin and theme changes on a copy is the single habit that prevents most catastrophic site breakages.

Method 2: Manual Installation via FTP

Manual installation is worth knowing because it explains what the one-click installer is actually doing, and because it is the fallback when an installer fails.

1. Download the latest WordPress package from wordpress.org and unzip it locally.
2. In your hosting control panel, create a new MySQL database and a database user, then assign that user full privileges on the database. Record the database name, username, password, and host value.
3. Connect to your server with an FTP client such as FileZilla, or use the host’s file manager.
4. Upload the contents of the unzipped WordPress folder — the contents, not the folder itself — into the public_html or www directory.
5. Visit yourdomain.com in a browser. The WordPress setup wizard launches automatically.
6. Enter the database details recorded in step two. WordPress writes wp-config.php from these values.
7. Complete the site title and administrator account screen, then log in.

The most common failure here is the database host value. It is localhost on the majority of shared hosts, but some providers use a dedicated hostname, and the setup screen will simply report a connection error without explaining which field is wrong. The host’s knowledge base will state the correct value.

Method 3: Installing WordPress Locally

A local installation runs WordPress on your own computer with no public address. It costs nothing, it cannot be hacked from outside, and it is the right place to learn the admin interface or to trial a theme before committing. Tools such as Local, XAMPP, and MAMP bundle PHP, MySQL, and a web server into a single application, reducing setup to a few clicks.

The tradeoff is that nobody else can see the result. A local site has no domain, no SSL certificate, and no real-world performance characteristics. It is a workshop, not a showroom. Work built locally still has to be migrated to a live host, and that migration is its own small project involving database URL replacement.

First Steps After Installation

A fresh WordPress installation ships with defaults that suit nobody particularly well. Five changes are worth making immediately, before any content exists.

Set permalinks to Post name under Settings, Permalinks. The default structure uses post IDs, which are useless to both readers and search engines, and changing it after a site has been indexed creates a redirect cleanup job. Delete the sample post, sample page, and the pre-installed themes and plugins that will not be used — dormant code is still an attack surface. Confirm the site title and tagline, since the placeholder tagline appears in search results until it is replaced. Install an SSL certificate if the host has not done so automatically, and verify the site loads over HTTPS. Finally, set a backup routine, either through the host or a plugin.

Common Installation Errors and How to Resolve Them

The error establishing a database connection message means the credentials in wp-config.php do not match the database, or the database server is unreachable. Re-check the four values written during manual setup. A white screen with no error text usually indicates a PHP memory limit that is too low or a fatal error in a plugin or theme; raising the memory limit or renaming the plugins folder over FTP isolates the cause quickly.

A site that loads the homepage but returns 404 errors on every other page has a permalink problem. Resaving the permalink structure under Settings regenerates the rewrite rules and resolves it in most cases. If the installer reports that WordPress is already installed, an earlier attempt created database tables; dropping the database and recreating it clears the conflict.

Top 10 WordPress Hosting Platforms for a New Installation

The platforms below were selected on four grounds: how little friction stands between signup and a working WordPress installation, the honesty of the pricing across the full term rather than the first year, the resources included at the entry tier, and who each one genuinely suits. All prices were taken from the provider’s own pricing page and are quoted in USD. The ranking runs from broadest applicability to most specialised, not from cheapest to most expensive.

1. Hostinger — Best Overall Value for a First Installation

Hostinger pairs a WordPress.org recommendation with the lowest credible entry pricing of any managed option, running on a LiteSpeed stack that performs well above its price bracket. The Premium plan runs at $2.99 per month on a 48-month term, totalling $143.52 upfront, and renews at $10.99 per month. That covers three websites, 20 GB of SSD storage, a free domain for one year, and weekly backups. The Unlimited plan at $3.99 per month, renewing at $16.99, adds unlimited sites, 50 GB of NVMe storage, and daily backups with restore.

• One-click WordPress installation through the hPanel dashboard
• Free domain for the first year on all listed plans
• One-click staging environment for safe testing
• WP-CLI, SSH access, and Git integration included
• 30-day money-back guarantee

The dashboard is genuinely approachable for someone installing WordPress for the first time, and free unlimited migrations remove the cost of changing your mind later. The real limitation is the term structure: the headline $2.99 rate requires four years paid in a single upfront charge, and the entry Premium plan drops to weekly rather than daily backups. Anyone unwilling to commit four years is looking at a materially different number.

2. SiteGround — Best for Support During Setup

SiteGround has built its reputation on support quality, which matters disproportionately when an installation goes wrong at an awkward hour. The StartUp plan is $2.99 per month prepaid for twelve months, covering one website with 10 GB of storage and unlimited traffic. GrowBig at $4.99 per month adds unlimited websites, 50 GB of storage, staging, and on-demand backups. GoGeek at $7.99 per month reaches 100 GB with Git and priority support.

• Free WordPress installation and automated site transfer
• Free daily backups stored in a separate geographic location
• Speed Optimizer and Security Optimizer plugins developed in house
• Free domain and SSL across all plans
• 30-day money-back guarantee

The in-house plugins remove a decision new users usually get wrong, and the 24/7 human support is the strongest of any budget-tier provider here. The weakness is severe and well documented: StartUp renews at $17.99, GrowBig at $29.99, and GoGeek at $44.99 — a sixfold jump at the entry level. SiteGround is excellent value in year one and expensive in year two.

3. Bluehost — Best Guided Onboarding for Beginners

Bluehost has held a WordPress.org recommendation since 2005, and its installation flow is built around someone who has never seen a control panel. The Starter plan is $3.99 per month on a 36-month term, renewing at $9.99, and includes 10 websites, 10 GB of NVMe storage, and capacity suited to roughly 40,000 visits monthly. Business at $6.99 per month, renewing at $13.99, extends to 50 websites and 50 GB.

• WordPress pre-installed with an AI-assisted site builder
• Free domain for the first year and free SSL
• One-click staging on all standard plans
• Yoast SEO included at no cost
• 99.99% uptime SLA and 30-day money-back guarantee

The guided setup genuinely lowers the barrier, and the renewal rate of $9.99 is the mildest increase among the mainstream shared hosts. Against that, the Starter plan runs weekly rather than daily backups and excludes phone support entirely, so the tier most beginners buy is the tier with the least help attached.

4. DreamHost — Cheapest Credible Entry Point

DreamHost has hosted sites since 1997 and employs WordPress core contributors. The Launch plan is the lowest introductory rate in this list at $1.99 per month across the first four years, renewing at $7.99, and covers 25 websites, 25 GB of NVMe storage, and roughly 40,000 monthly visits. Growth at $3.49 per month, renewing at $8.99, moves to 50 sites and 200,000 visits. Scale at $7.99 per month renews at $19.99.

• Free automated WordPress migration plugin
• Daily automated backups on every plan
• Unmetered bandwidth across all tiers
• Free domain for one year on annual and multi-year plans
• 30-day money-back guarantee

Both the introductory and renewal rates are among the lowest here, which makes the long-term arithmetic unusually favourable. The constraint is that email is only a three-month trial on WordPress Hosting plans and is billed separately afterwards, and the headline price again depends on a four-year commitment charged in full at checkout.

5. WordPress.com — Best When You Want No Installation at All

WordPress.com removes the installation step entirely: the software is already running, and setup is account creation rather than deployment. The Personal plan is $4 per month billed annually, or $9 monthly, with 6 GB of storage and full access to over 60,000 plugins. Business at $25 per month billed annually, or $40 monthly, adds 50 GB, SFTP and SSH, WP-CLI, Git commands, GitHub deployments, and real-time backups. A free tier exists indefinitely with 1 GB of storage.

• Zero installation or server maintenance
• Free domain for one year on annual plans
• Plugin installation available from the Personal plan upward
• Automated datacenter failover and global edge caching
• Real-time backups and one-click restores on Business and above

For anyone whose priority is publishing rather than administration, this is the shortest path to a live site, and the free plan is a genuine way to learn the interface at no cost. The tradeoff is control: the free tier displays advertising to visitors, blocks plugin installation, and the developer tooling most self-hosted users expect only arrives at the $25 Business tier.

6. Cloudways — Best for Predictable Pay-As-You-Go Scaling

Cloudways sits between shared hosting and raw cloud infrastructure, managing servers on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud on your behalf. Flexible plans start at $11 per month for 2 GB of RAM, one vCPU, 50 GB of storage, and 2 TB of bandwidth, billed hourly with no renewal increase. The Autonomous line, built on Kubernetes with autoscaling, starts at $35 per month. A three-day trial runs without a credit card.

• Unlimited WordPress applications per server
• Free staging environments with one-click push
• Free Object Cache Pro and Redis caching on qualifying servers
• Server-level firewall with IP and country blocking
• Free managed migration handled by their engineers

Hourly billing and the absence of renewal hikes make long-term cost genuinely predictable, which is rare in this market. The honest drawback is that Cloudways assumes a degree of server literacy — choosing a provider, a region, and a server size is more decision-making than a one-click host demands — and email hosting is a paid add-on rather than an included feature.

7. Rocket.net — The Lesser-Known Performance Pick

Rocket.net is the entry on this list least likely to appear on competing pages, and it earns inclusion on a pricing policy the rest of the industry avoids: no renewal increases, ever. The Starter plan is $30 per month, or $25 per month billed annually, with a $1 first month. That covers one WordPress install, 10 GB of storage, 50 GB of bandwidth, and unmetered visitors. Pro at $60 monthly or $50 annually extends to three installs.

• Cloudflare Enterprise CDN included on every plan
• Enterprise web application firewall and real-time malware scanning
• Unlimited PHP workers on all tiers
• WP Rocket and WP Umbrella included at no extra cost
• 30-day money-back guarantee with free unlimited migrations

Unmetered visitors at the entry tier is unusual, and the stated refusal to raise renewal prices removes the single largest hidden cost in shared hosting. The limitations are real: Rocket.net hosts WordPress only, offers no email service whatsoever, and the 50 GB bandwidth allowance on Starter is modest for a media-heavy site, with overages billed at $0.08 per GB.

8. Pressable — Best for Agencies Running Multiple Installations

Pressable is an Automattic company, which places it in the same corporate family as WordPress.com and WooCommerce. Signature 1 is $25 per month for one WordPress install, 30,000 monthly visits, and 20 GB of storage, with a staging site and a sandbox site included. Signature 2 at $45 per month covers up to three installs and 50,000 visits; Signature 4 at $90 reaches ten installs and 150,000 visits.

• Staging and sandbox environments included on every plan
• White-label hosting available for client work
• Built by the team behind WooCommerce, with matching expertise
• Pressable MCP for managing hosting through AI tooling
• Clear per-install scaling across eight published tiers

The inclusion of both a staging and a separate sandbox site at every tier is more generous than most competitors manage, and the per-install pricing ladder is unusually transparent for agency planning. The weakness for a first-time installer is simply fit — at $25 per month for a single site with a 30,000-visit cap, it is poor value next to Hostinger or DreamHost unless multiple client sites are involved.

9. Kinsta — Best Premium Managed Hosting

Kinsta runs on Google Cloud’s C3D infrastructure with Cloudflare Enterprise in front, and targets sites where downtime has a measurable cost. The entry Single and Launch plans are $35 per month, or $30 per month billed annually at $350 for the year, with the first month free on select plans. That covers one WordPress install, 10 GB of storage, 125 GB of CDN bandwidth, and 14-day backup retention. Pricing climbs steadily to $375 per month at the top business tier.

• Unlimited free migrations handled by their team
• Free malware removal for the life of the account
• Built-in APM tool for diagnosing performance bottlenecks
• Up to 99.99% uptime SLA on all plans
• Free one-click staging environments

Pricing is flat with no renewal shock, and the included services — migrations, malware removal, Cloudflare Enterprise — would cost significantly more assembled separately. The cost of entry is the obvious barrier at roughly ten times Hostinger’s effective rate, and several features users assume are standard are priced add-ons: Redis caching runs $100 per site monthly and hourly backups another $100.

10. WP Engine — Best for Complex and High-Traffic Builds

WP Engine is the enterprise-oriented option, with an Essential plan starting at $28 per month billed annually, charged as $336 upfront. That tier spans 25,000 to 400,000 monthly visits, 10 to 50 GB of storage, and 75 GB of bandwidth. The Business plan starts at $400 per month and adds isolated resources, managed migrations, phone support, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.

• Daily automated backups with 30 to 60 day retention
• EverCache WordPress-optimised caching layer
• Global CDN powered by Cloudflare
• Ten premium themes and Genesis Blocks included
• Transferable sites for agency and freelance handoff

The visit allowance at the Essential tier is broad enough to carry a site a long way without a plan change, and the transferable-sites feature is genuinely useful for anyone building on behalf of clients. The gap in the range is stark: the jump from Essential at $28 to Business at $400 leaves no middle tier, and features including advanced DDoS protection and application performance monitoring are add-ons rather than inclusions on Essential.

Pricing Comparison Across the Full Term

The cheapest viable entry is DreamHost Launch at $1.99 per month, though that figure assumes a four-year prepayment and renews at $7.99. Hostinger Premium at $2.99 and SiteGround StartUp at $2.99 match each other on the headline, but diverge sharply afterwards — Hostinger renews at $10.99 while SiteGround renews at $17.99, a difference of $84 per year from the second term onward. Bluehost’s $3.99 opening is the highest of the budget group and its $9.99 renewal the lowest, which makes it the strongest of the four on a three-year view.

The best value in the middle belongs to Cloudways at $11 per month and Rocket.net at $25 annually. Neither raises prices at renewal, so the first-month figure is also the fifth-year figure. For a site that will still exist in three years, Rocket.net at a flat $300 annually undercuts SiteGround GoGeek’s $44.99 renewal rate while delivering Cloudflare Enterprise and unmetered visitors.

At the premium end, the question is what the money buys rather than how much it is. Kinsta at $30 annually per month and WP Engine at $28 monthly billed annually are within a few dollars of each other, and both are roughly ten times the budget tier. What that multiple purchases is isolation from other tenants, included malware remediation, enterprise CDN, and support staffed by people who work on WordPress rather than on hosting generally. For a hobby blog that is poor value. For a site generating revenue, a single prevented outage covers the annual difference.

How to Choose a Host for Your Installation

Start with the renewal price rather than the introductory one, because that is the number you will pay for most of the relationship. A site that lives five years on SiteGround StartUp costs $2.99 for twelve months and $17.99 for forty-eight, so the advertised rate describes a fifth of the actual commitment. Hostinger, Bluehost, and DreamHost all renew below $11, and Cloudways, Rocket.net, Kinsta, and WP Engine do not raise rates at all.

Weigh the term length against your certainty. The lowest rates from Hostinger and DreamHost require 48-month prepayments charged in full at checkout. If the project might not survive a year, SiteGround’s twelve-month term or Cloudways’ hourly billing carries far less risk, and the 30-day money-back guarantees offered by Hostinger, SiteGround, Bluehost, DreamHost, Rocket.net, and Kinsta provide a genuine exit.

Consider how many installations you need. A single site runs comfortably on SiteGround StartUp, Rocket.net Starter, or Kinsta’s entry plan. Ten or more points toward Bluehost Starter, DreamHost Launch at 25 sites, or Pressable Signature 4. Agencies managing client work should look at Pressable’s white-label option or WP Engine’s transferable sites before anything else on this list.

Match the traffic allowance honestly to expectations rather than ambitions. Bluehost Starter is specified for roughly 40,000 visits monthly, Pressable Signature 1 caps at 30,000, and Kinsta’s entry tier at 35,000. Rocket.net and SiteGround both offer unmetered visitors at entry level, which removes the question entirely. Overage policies differ sharply — Kinsta applies fees above the limit while Rocket.net bills bandwidth at $0.08 per GB — so the ceiling matters less than what happens when you reach it.

Finally, account for backups and email, the two inclusions most commonly missing. Hostinger Premium and Bluehost Starter both run weekly rather than daily backups at entry level. Rocket.net provides no email service at all, Cloudways charges for it separately, and DreamHost includes only a three-month trial. These are small line items individually and meaningful in aggregate.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to install WordPress?

A one-click installation through a host’s control panel completes in under a minute, with the whole process including account setup taking roughly ten minutes. A manual installation over FTP takes fifteen to thirty minutes depending on connection speed and familiarity with database creation. Configuration afterwards takes longer than installation itself.

Is WordPress free to install?

The WordPress software is free and open source, with no licence fee at any scale. The recurring costs are hosting and a domain name. Entry-level WordPress hosting runs from roughly $2 to $11 monthly, and most annual plans include a domain free for the first year. Premium themes and plugins are optional additional costs.

Do I need coding knowledge to install WordPress?

No. One-click installers require no code at all, and the setup wizard asks only for a site title, username, password, and email address. Manual installation requires comfort with an FTP client and a database creation screen, but still involves no programming. Themes and plugins extend functionality without code.

What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

WordPress.org is the free software you install on hosting you control and maintain yourself. WordPress.com is a hosted service where installation, security, backups, and updates are handled for you, starting at $4 monthly billed annually. The .org route offers full control; the .com route removes administration in exchange for platform constraints.

Can I install WordPress on my own computer?

Yes. Tools such as Local, XAMPP, and MAMP bundle PHP, MySQL, and a web server into one application, letting WordPress run offline at no cost. A local site cannot be reached by visitors and has no domain or SSL certificate, making it suited to learning, theme testing, and development rather than publishing.

What should I do immediately after installing WordPress?

Set permalinks to Post name, delete the sample content and any unused themes and plugins, confirm the site title and tagline, verify the site loads over HTTPS, and establish a backup routine. These five steps take a few minutes and prevent problems that become difficult to reverse once a site has been indexed.

Pro Tips

Create the staging environment before you need it, not after something breaks. Hostinger, SiteGround GrowBig, Bluehost, Cloudways, Rocket.net, Pressable, Kinsta, and WP Engine all include staging, yet most new installations never use it. A plugin conflict discovered on staging costs twenty minutes; the same conflict discovered on a live site during business hours costs considerably more.

Check whether your host disables post revisions by default. Several performance-oriented hosts do so to reduce database bloat, and the setting is rarely announced. Without revisions, an overwritten page has no recovery path short of restoring a full backup — which, on a plan running weekly backups, could mean losing six days of work.

Register the administrator email on a domain you control separately from the site itself. Using an address at the same domain WordPress is installed on creates a circular dependency: if the site goes down and takes email with it, the password reset message has nowhere to arrive. A separate address removes that failure mode entirely.

Calculate the full-term cost before checkout rather than the monthly rate. A 48-month Hostinger Premium plan is $143.52 charged in a single transaction, and DreamHost’s Launch tier works the same way. Neither is poorly priced, but both are substantially larger single payments than the advertised figure suggests, and a month-to-month mental model produces an unpleasant surprise at the payment screen.

Test the restore path, not just the backup. Backups that have never been restored are untested assumptions. Shortly after installation, when there is nothing of value to lose, run a restore on the staging environment and confirm it completes. Discovering that a backup is corrupt at the moment it is needed is the worst possible time to learn it.

Keep the number of installed plugins deliberately low from the start. Every plugin adds code that must be updated, carries potential vulnerabilities, and can conflict with others. A fresh installation is the easiest time to establish discipline, because adding a plugin to a clean site is painless while removing one from a mature site often means untangling dependencies and orphaned database entries.

Getting the Installation Right the First Time

The installation itself is genuinely straightforward — one-click installers have reduced it to a sixty-second task, and even the manual FTP route is a well-documented sequence of seven steps. What determines whether the next three years are comfortable or frustrating is the hosting decision made before the installer ever runs, and specifically the renewal price, the term length, and whether backups run daily or weekly.

For most first installations, Hostinger Premium at $2.99 monthly renewing at $10.99 offers the strongest combination of price, performance, and approachability, with DreamHost Launch at $1.99 renewing at $7.99 the better choice for anyone prioritising the lowest total cost across several years. Those wanting support during setup should weigh SiteGround StartUp despite its $17.99 renewal, and anyone avoiding installation entirely will find WordPress.com Personal at $4 monthly the shortest route to a live site.

Sites with revenue attached justify different arithmetic. Rocket.net at $25 monthly billed annually delivers Cloudflare Enterprise and unmetered visitors with a stated commitment never to raise renewal rates, which over five years compares favourably to budget hosts at their second-term pricing. Kinsta at $30 and WP Engine at $28 billed annually buy isolation, included malware remediation, and specialist support — worth the premium when downtime carries a measurable cost, and difficult to justify when it does not.