Great! You just bought web hosting from SiteGround but how do you install WordPress on SiteGround?
In this step-by-step tutorial, I will show you exactly how to install WordPress on a SiteGround web hosting plan.
1. Choose your SiteGround hosting plan
You chose with which hosting company you wanted to host your website with. Now, it’s time to choose what plan is best for you.
SiteGround offers three different plans: StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek. I’d say that choosing a plan depends on three main criteria.
How many websites do you want?
The StartUp plan only allows one website where the GrowBig and GoGeek plans allow for unlimited websites.
So, if you’re looking to create more than one website, the StartUp plan is out of the picture.
How much space do you need?
This is the trickiest part, how much space do you actually need for your website(s)?
Well, a WordPress installation, without anything, takes about 30.8MB. If you add a 10MB theme, and fifteen 25MB plugins a website should take approximately 375MB.
However, that’s not the whole picture. What takes the most space on a website is all the images and videos used on it. A high quality image from Pexels.com takes about 2-5MB of space. That being said, if you already had 10 images on your website it takes about 425MB of space now.
Let’s say that each blog article you post takes 15MB, you should be able to post around 638 blog articles on your website before reaching the 10GB limit of the StartUp plan.
Using those calculations, the StartUp plan should be more than enough to get you started with one website.
But, what if you want more than one website?
The GrowBig plan comes with 20GB so it should be enough to host anywhere from 1 to 10 websites without any problems.
The only scenario where 20GB won’t be enough is if you want to create more than 10 websites or are looking to create a website with user generated content. In that case, you should probably go for the GoGeek plan.
How many monthly visits do you have on your website?
Each plan has a limit in monthly visits. The StartUp plan can handle about 10,000 visits per month, the GrowBig can take about 25,000 visits, and the GoGeek plan can take up to 100,000 visits per month.
Thus, if it’s your first website and you don’t plan on having more than 10,000 visits, the StartUp plan should do it.
But, if you already have a website and you plan on migrating to SiteGround or you’re going to run ads to your website, I’d recommend going with the GrowBig or GoGeek plans depending on how much traffic your website currently has or how much money you plan on spending on ads.
So what’s the best plan for me?
If it’s your first and only website that won’t use more than 10GB: You should go with the StartUp plan. It’s the cheapest one and you probably won’t need anything else for the beginning.
If you will migrate your website to SiteGround: Go for the GrowBig or GoGeek plans depending on your traffic.
If you want to create multiple websites: Go with the GrowBig or GoGeek plans depending on how much traffic you’re expecting and how much space you need.
2. Choose your domain name
Now that you selected the right hosting plan, it’s time to choose the right domain for your project.
Don’t have a domain yet?
If you don’t have a domain yet, you can buy it directly from SiteGround and it’s the easiest option for most people.
If you don’t know what domain name to buy, I’d recommend using Wordoid. It’s a free online tool that will show you available domains depending on criterias you select.
For example, if you’re starting a blog about fitness, you could search all the domain names available that begin with “fit” and are 10 words or less in length.
In this case, I found the domain Fitteracy.com which sounds pretty good for a blog about fitness.
3. Review and complete your order
This is the last step before being able to install WordPress on your SiteGround web hosting.
You just have to fill out everything and pay for the plan you chose!
4. Go to the SiteGround cPanel
Now that you have an active web hosting subscription with SiteGround, it’s time to install WordPress.
Login to your SiteGround Customer Area and open the control panel (cPanel).
5. Open the WordPress installer
Then, click on the WordPress installer tool to install WordPress on your account.
After that, you need to click on the “Install” button.
6. Fill in the information
Finally, you have to choose all the settings of your brand new WordPress site. I’ll walk you through all the settings and what you should select for your website:
- Choose Protocol: Here you can choose to use SSL or not on your website, only activate it if you have SSL on your hosting plan.
- Choose Domain: Here you can select the domain where WordPress will be installed.
- In Directory: You should leave this field blank for most use cases. It basically allows to install a WordPress site in a subfolder. So, if you want your website to be accessible at yourdomain.com, leave it blank. If you want your website to be accessible at yourdomain.com/something, you can write the name of the directory in the field.
- Site Name: This will be the name of your website. In most cases, I’d recommend using the same name as your domain name because it’ll be easier for users to remember.
- Site Description: This is what will show up on Google and at the top of the browser when someone is on your home page. I’d recommend writing a small sentence about what’s on your website. If you plan on writing news articles about tech for example, you could write “The Latest Tech News about Google, Apple and more”.
- Enable Multisite: WPMU is a feature that allows you to create multiple WordPress websites within one WordPress installation. All these sites have to share the same plugins and themes. I’d recommend to keep this box unchecked, even if you want more than one website.
- Admin Username: This will be your username on WordPress. You should use something hard to guess to make sure no one can get access to your account.
- Admin Password: This will be the password used to login on WordPress. I strongly recommend using a password generator for this or at the very least use an original password that you didn’t use somewhere else.
- Admin Email: Enter an email address for your WordPress account. It’s really important to have the right email address here since you will need it to reset your password if you forget it.
- Select Language: Choose the language of your website here.
- Limit Login Attempts (Loginizer): If you tick this box, it’ll automatically install a plugin that will limit the number of attempts someone has when trying to login to your website. I’d recommend only installing the plugin if you don’t plan on installing another security plugin.
- Choose a Theme to install: You can choose a theme for your website here, but you should probably install a theme on your own, once WordPress is installed.
- Advanced Options: Here you can rename the database and table prefix. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can leave it as is.
Once everything is setup, you can click the “Install” button and WordPress will be installed on your SiteGround web hosting.
7. Here you go! You have installed WordPress on SiteGround
Your WordPress website is now created and fully functional. You should be able to go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and login with the credentials you created earlier.
You can also checkout our other blog posts and learn more about WordPress and SiteGround!
One Response
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