Today I’m going to bring you a step by step tutorial on how to install WordPress on Bluehost hosting. It takes about eight minutes from start to finish, whether you have your own domain name (www.mydomain.com) or if you just want to test out WordPress in a subdirectory of an existing domain (www.mydomain.com/mywordpresstest). I include step by step instructions as well as some additional templates you can use to help you quickly set up your WordPress sites.
First things first, if you don’t already have a Bluehost hosting account, I highly recommend their services as they are affordable, reliable and their customer support is some of the best in the industry. I’ve been with them for over six years and have been more than happy with their hosting.
Get your own Bluehost website hosting account here.
Installing WordPress on Bluehost with Simple Scripts
First, let me explain that there are a number of ways you can go about installing WordPress on your hosting account, but I’ve found Simple Scripts to be one of the best and here’s a few reasons why:
- It’s fast and easy
- Simple Scripts integrates into Bluehost’s cPanel and will notify you when you log in of any urgent updates that are suggested and gives you a quick way to manage all your WordPress installs
- Simple Scripts stays up to date with the latest WordPress releases
Steps to Install WordPress on Bluehost with Simple Scripts
- Log into your Bluehost control panel
- Create a new mySQL database
- Create a new mySQL database user
- Assign the new database user to your new database and give the user full rights
- Open up the Simple Scripts page and click the WordPress Install
- Fill out the WordPress installation form with the information from your database and user from step 2 & 3 above and continue
- After the WordPress installation is complete, set up AwStats for your new WordPress installation
A few notes on the steps above – steps 2 & 3 aren’t necessary in that Simple Scripts will actually create a database and a user for you, however, doing so creates a database that looks like: yourdomain_wrd1 and similarly, your user will look like: yourdomain_wrd1. While this may not sound like a big deal right now, if you decide that you want to start creating multiple niche sites, or even if you just start creating multiple blogs under one existing site, you’ll quickly find that all these wrdxx names really don’t help you out much. Another reason I strongly suggest that you create your own database is if you host multiple sites under your Bluehost account, which I definitely do, then you’ll want to consider what an exit strategy might be for your site. It’ll just make it easier to bundle up your site if you have clean database and user names. Also, it really doesn’t take much longer to do this – for an extra minute and a half worth of work, you now have a well organized installation that will save you way more time in the future.
A couple of notes on the creation of the databases and the users in the video. First, I typically create my own username/password, but for the sake of creating a video and not exposing my passwords and logins to the world, I used the built in generator – which, isn’t a bad option. I’d just suggest keeping a master password file on your computer and backed up somewhere else so you can get into your sites in the future! There are a number of programs out there that will store usernames and passwords, but you could use a simple text document for the poor man’s way out.
Here’s a template for storing usernames/passwords in case you want to go the text document way:
================================================================== ================================================================== site1.com Wordpress Login user / pass Database Info: Name: domain_site1 User: domain_site1 Pass: dbpass ================================================================== ================================================================== site2.com Wordpress Login user / pass Database Info: Name: domain_site2 User: domain_site2 Pass: dbpass ================================================================== ==================================================================
Resources
Bluehost Website Hosting (affiliate link) – affordable, reliable hosting for your site
WordPress – A blog/CMS platform for your personal or business website
Conclusion
I hope this video has been helpful, and please, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, leave me some feedback below. In future posts, I’ll be walking you through getting some essential plugins for your WordPress install and how to get a professional look for your new site. Thanks and best of luck!