There are many hosting companies to choose from and one company that I like is called SiteGround. I find them perfect for installing WordPress websites. They have a variety of amazing features and overall I find the company offers excellent service.
A common issue with many other companies is that the WordPress sites run very slow, and this is not a problem on SiteGround.
Setting up a Siteground for WordPress - Hosting Account
To set up a hosting account on SiteGround, go to SiteGround.com. On the homepage of the website, you will find the various hosting options they offer. You can choose “WordPress Hosting” if you wish, or if you are planning a WooCommerce website then you can choose the “WooCommerce Hosting” but the actual hosting is the same, and you can add the plugin later.
Click on the “WordPress Hosting” option and you are presented with three plans to choose from
StartUp
This plan will host just one website, which may be enough for many people who just want to host one site.
Grow Big
This is the option I choose and allows me to host many websites and importantly allows back-up, which is very useful if things go wrong, like a mistake, or your website getting hacked. This allows you to put your site back to how it was before the problem occurred.
GoGeek
There is an even more comprehensive plan but it is probably more than readers of this tutorial will probably need, so we will move on and select “GROW BIG.“
We click on “Select Plan” just under Grow Big. This will take you to a form that is pretty self-explanatory and allows you to enter your information, including the payment information, so you can pay by credit card. Then finally you can choose which payment plan you want, the longer in advance you pay, the cheaper the monthly cost is.
Decide if you want to include the site scanner extra, which scans your site for malicious content which could damage your site. After you have selected that or not, then you simply confirm the information and pay. Once you do that you are done and you will receive an email that has the link to your SiteGround panel.
When you receive that email you can go to your Siteground panel where you can choose various options. On the top of the page will be an orange button saying “Get Started.” Click on that and you will be asked to “Add a Domain Name.” You will be able to buy a domain name, import one that you already own, or use a temporary domain name.
If trying to buy a domain name and you choose a name that has already gone, it will display a list of similar names for you to choose from. Once all that is done you will be brought to the Website details page where we can proceed to create our WordPress website. (see the next section).
How To Install WordPress On SiteGround
Having set up your website we will now look at adding WordPress to the account. On the Websites Tab, you will see a box for each website you have hosted on your SiteGround account. In each box is a button that says “SITE TOOLS.“
Click on the “SITE TOOLS” button on your website box and you will be taken directly to the “SITE TOOLS” page for your website. This is where you control everything related to the domain name. You will notice at the top it says “Hello, XXXX”, with XXXX being replaced by your name.
Many hosting companies use a control Panel Called “CPANEL.” “SITE TOOLS” is SiteGround’s own version of this application. It is quite a nice little system and will enable you to control your website in various ways.
On the left of the page is a black menu area. This area contains all the options you will need to manage your website. The following sections are typically listed …
- Dashboard
- Site
- Speed
- WordPress
- Domain
- Statistics
- Devs
Each section has various subheadings so that you can find the exact option you are looking for. We will click on one of the “WordPress” options. This option is labeled as “Install & Manage.” Click on this option and a new page appears which has two boxes. The first one is labeled “WordPress“, and the second one is labeled “WordPress & WooCommerce.” The first option will install WordPress On SiteGround only and the second option has WooCommerce installed at the same time.
We will choose the basic WordPress option. When we click on it an orange box that says “Selected” will appear and we can scroll down the page. Underneath this box is a variety of pieces of information.
Domain
This is a drop-down box and we can choose from all the domains already installed on this account. This is the domain where WordPress will be installed.
Installation Path
If we leave this as it is, WordPress will be installed in the main domain. If we prefer it to be installed in our “maindomain/blog” we would simply insert “/blog” in this box. Or we could choose any other folder name.
Language
Here we can choose the language for the installation.
Install with WordPress Starter
Next, we have a checkbox that is preselected (checked) with a tick. If you leave the tick it will install the “WordPress Starter.” We will leave it checked so I can show it to you.
Admin Info
Here we will put our “WordPress username and password. For Username, many people will put “Admin” here, but that is not good for security so call it something else. For passwords, you can either use the password generator or make your own. Either way, make sure you know what it is. Finally, you are asked to enter the email address of the administrator.
Add Ons
There is another checkbox that says “Install WordPress Multisite.” If you leave this checked it will install the facility which allows you to make several associated Wordpres websites from this installation. We don’t need that for this example so we will uncheck it.
Click Install
To complete the WordPress set-up, click on the button that says “Install.” This may take a few moments, so just be patient.
Eventually, another page will open up that confirms your WordPress has been installed on the site. You are provided with two option buttons. The first says “ADMIN PANEL” and when clicked will take you to your WordPress Admin Dashboard. The second option is to press “View Site” and this will take you to the home page of your website.
What may, and probably will, happen is that you get a warning screen that comes up announcing that “This connection is not private.” Do not panic, this is quite normal. What it means is that the browser was expecting a “Secure Site” and it didn’t find one. It was looking for an SSL certificate and there was not one there.
Installing an SSL Certificate on Siteground
We go back to the SiteGround and select the Option “Security” from the left-hand menu. The sub-options open and one of them says “SSL Manager.” Select this option and a new page opens that asks you to select the domain name you want to install the certificate on. You are then asked to select SSL. Click on that box and open the drop-down list. Select “Let’s Encrypt” Then click on the button marked “GET“
This will install an SSL certificate on your site. This is included in the price of your Siteground Hosting. It may take a few moments so be patient. Once it’s done it will tell you that “Let’s Encrypt is installed.”
Now choose “HTTPS Enforce” from the left-hand menu. The new page will display your website and you should turn on the HTTPS Enforce using the right-hand side selector. This converts your website URL to switch from “HTTP” to “HTTPS” and will add a little padlock to the address bar.
Go back to your website page that has the warning about not being secure and refresh the page. It will now open the homepage of your website as a secure page.
To get to the “Admin Panel” just type into the address bar “wp-admin”. This is going to take you to a new page where it says “Welcome to Your WordPress Site!” You are seeing this because you installed the starter package. It is an introduction that you may find useful, however for this tutorial we will ignore it, so instead of hitting the “Exit” button. This will take us to the actual “WordPress Dashboard.”
When the dashboard opens there is a modified version of the Dashboard that SiteGround has developed. (If you want to learn more about the standard dashboard that other hosts use, we have a tutorial of that in another article).
However, you can switch this modified dashboard off. It was installed as part of the WordPress Starter that we selected. To go back to a standard dashboard, go to plugins and then deactivate the WordPress Starter plugin. The dashboard will then return to normal.
You can avoid having to do this by not checking the “Install WordPress Starter” earlier in the process.
You can see, how easy it is to install WordPress on SiteGround hosting and it certainly does not take long at all.
