Creation of a WordPress site

Hello friends. Today I want to start a series of articles about CMS WordPress. WordPress holds 42% of the market for all websites on the Internet, and 65% of the market for all websites using CMS technology (source: w3techs.com).

That is, it is a very popular content management system, and its potential is enormous.

In this article, I will show you how to create a website, install WordPress, add a domain name to it, connect and configure an SSL certificate.

Part 1. Installing WordPress

I will leave the choice of hosting and domain name to you. Everyone has their preferences in these matters. Some hosting providers themselves offer the installation of a CMS system. In this case, just use the installation wizard. Here we will consider the option of manual installation.

You can download Wordpress from the link https://wordpress.org/. After downloading and unpacking the archive, we connect to the site server via an FTP client. I am using Filezilla (https://filezilla-project.org/). You can find the data for connection on the page of your site on the hosting.

FTP credentials

Database credentials

You need to upload the unpacked Wordpress files to the root folder of the site (public_html; html; site; www and so on).

Uploading WordPress files to hosting using filezilla

Then we open the site and follow the instructions of the installation wizard. We indicate the parameters of the site database, as well as the data of the site administrator.

WordPress installation process

After entering the data and completing the installation, the login page for the admin panel will open. This means that the site is installed.

Part 2. Adding your domain name to the site

Now we will link our domain to the site. You can do this in two ways. The first is to add A records to the domain registrar website. The second is adding NS records. The difference between the options is where exactly the management of the DNS records will be located. When adding records via A, DNS must be entered at the domain registrar. When adding NS servers — on the hosting site. Data for NS or A records is provided by hosting. I will register NS servers for the testhosting.pp.ua domain. Later, if necessary, you can change this setting.

NS server on the domain registrar page

Part 3. SSL certificate and https

Most modern search engines and browsers check the site for an SSL certificate and can mark sites without SSL as untrustworthy. Therefore, we will immediately install the certificate on our site. Most hosting providers provide the ability to connect security certificates from your account. I will enable SSL Let’s Encrypt, and immediately enable auto-renewal of the certificate. You can see the padlock next to the site name, that is, the secure HTTPS protocol is used and the SSL certificate is working. There you can also check the information about the certificate by clicking on the lock sign.

Information about the SSL certificate of the site testhosting.pp.ua

Also, let’s add a redirect so that the site is always opened using the HTTPS protocol. This can be done both directly through editing the .htaccess file, or by a plugin (for example Really Simple SSL). I will choose the 1st option and add the following lines to file .htaccess (suitable if you have Apache2 as a web server on your hosting):

# BEGIN Redirect 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
# END Redirect

Conclusion

As a result, we got a site with the current version of WordPress installed, connected with its domain name and SSL certificate. In the next articles, I will continue to describe the site settings.