Install WordPress

Here we show you how to install Word­Press man­u­al­ly. Whether it real­ly makes more sense to install Word­Press man­u­al­ly or by 1Click is open to ques­tion. Those who install Word­Press man­u­al­ly know at least the inter­re­la­tions between the files on the serv­er and the inte­gra­tion with the web­hoster.

Step 1: Order webhosting

First a web­site must be ordered and avail­able. We show the dif­fer­ences in web­host­ing in a sep­a­rate arti­cle (cur­rent­ly only in ger­man).

Note: It can take up to 24 hours until a new web­site is avail­able. It makes sense to book the web­host­ing pack­age one day before the instal­la­tion.

Often web­hosters show con­struc­tion site pages to show that the page can be reached on the net. If “Web Page Not Found” or sim­i­lar is dis­played in the brows­er, you have to wait. An instal­la­tion is only pos­si­ble when the web­site is acces­si­ble.

Step 2: SSL Setup

An SSL cer­tifi­cate must be set up. Word­Press works with­out an SSL Cer­tifi­cate, but it is becom­ing increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to direct read­ers to a blog that is not secure.

If the web host does not offer a con­ve­nient solu­tion, the cer­tifi­cate can also be set up man­u­al­ly. How this works is shown in a sep­a­rate arti­cle (cur­rent­ly only in ger­man). The arti­cle is about the SSL con­ver­sion of a Word­Press blog, but at the begin­ning of the arti­cle we show how the cer­tifi­cate is cre­at­ed and uploaded.

Step 3: Create database

A MySQL data­base must have been cre­at­ed on the serv­er. To do this you need to go to the admin­is­tra­tion area of the web host, which is called either KIS or Plesk or some­thing sim­i­lar. The path to the cor­re­spond­ing option looks like this or sim­i­lar:

KIS Pro­duk­tver­wal­tung > Web­host­ing > Kon­fig­uri­eren > Skripte und Daten­banken > Daten­bank ver­wal­ten > Daten­bank anle­gen

or in the case of web­go:

web­go Web­space-Admin > Daten­banken > MySQL-Daten­banken > MySQL-Daten­bank anle­gen

Depend­ing on the web host, the data­base name and user can be freely cho­sen or it is pre­de­fined by the sys­tem. A pass­word must then be assigned. A com­ment or a descrip­tion of the data­base helps to improve the assign­ment.

Data­base name, user and pass­word are required lat­er for the Word­Press con­fig­u­ra­tion.

Atten­tion: Only one data­base may be used per appli­ca­tion. It would be the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble to let two CMS sys­tems access one data­base, but prob­lems are pre-pro­grammed and we strong­ly advise against it!

Step 4: Download WordPress

It is pos­si­ble to down­load Word­Press direct­ly as a Ger­man local­iza­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly you can down­load the Eng­lish ver­sion.

The Ger­man instal­la­tion can be found at https://de.wordpress.org/download/, the Eng­lish ver­sion at https://wordpress.org/download/. After the down­load the file must be unpacked into any direc­to­ry.

Step 5: wp-config configuration

This step is option­al. If you skip this step, you will auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate and con­fig­ure this file in a lat­er step of the instal­la­tion – name­ly after upload­ing the instal­la­tion to your own serv­er.

If you want to mod­i­fy the file in advance, you have to rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and then edit it with a text edi­tor.

Atten­tion: It is very impor­tant to use a text edi­tor and not a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram like Word or Pages. At the same time, nei­ther a space may be insert­ed at the begin­ning nor at the end of the file.

Basi­cal­ly, this file is well com­ment­ed. It is best not to change the com­ments and only search for the strings that are nec­es­sary for the con­fig­u­ra­tion. The texts to be changed by the user are high­light­ed in red in the exam­ple below. It becomes obvi­ous that there is not much to change in the con­fig­u­ra­tion file. Fur­ther down, I will go into the indi­vid­ual entries in more detail.

This is what the wp-config.php file looks like:

// ** MySQL-Einstellungen ** //
/** Diese Zugangsdaten bekommst du von deinem Webhoster. **/

/**
* Ersetze datenbankname_hier_einfuegen
* mit dem Namen der Datenbank, die du verwenden möchtest.
*/
define('DB_NAME', 'datenbankname_hier_einfuegen');

/**
* Ersetze benutzername_hier_einfuegen
* mit deinem MySQL-Datenbank-Benutzernamen.
*/
define('DB_USER', 'benutzername_hier_einfuegen');

/**
* Ersetze passwort_hier_einfuegen mit deinem MySQL-Passwort.
*/
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'passwort_hier_einfuegen');

/**
* Ersetze localhost mit der MySQL-Serveradresse.
*/
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/**
* Der Datenbankzeichensatz, der beim Erstellen der
* Datenbanktabellen verwendet werden soll
*/
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/**
* Der Collate-Type sollte nicht geändert werden.
*/
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

/**#@+
* Sicherheitsschlüssel
*
* Ändere jeden untenstehenden Platzhaltertext in eine beliebige,
* möglichst einmalig genutzte Zeichenkette.
* Auf der Seite {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/ WordPress.org secret-key service}
* kannst du dir alle Schlüssel generieren lassen.
* Du kannst die Schlüssel jederzeit wieder ändern, alle angemeldeten
* Benutzer müssen sich danach erneut anmelden.
*
* @since 2.6.0
*/
define('AUTH_KEY', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('AUTH_SALT', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');
define('NONCE_SALT', 'Füge hier deine Zeichenkette ein');

/**#@-*/

/**
* WordPress Datenbanktabellen-Präfix
*
* Wenn du verschiedene Präfixe benutzt, kannst du innerhalb einer Datenbank
* verschiedene WordPress-Installationen betreiben.
* Bitte verwende nur Zahlen, Buchstaben und Unterstriche!
*/
$table_prefix = 'wp_';

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘datenbankname_hier_einfuegen’);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘benutzername_hier_einfuegen’);
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘passwort_hier_einfuegen’);

Here you enter the data­base name, user name and pass­word as they were cre­at­ed in step 3. Please make sure that only the red text is changed (if you have a red weak­ness: the text between the punc­tu­a­tion mark as »’«).

$table_prefix = ‘wp_’;

It is rec­om­mend­ed to change the pre­fix so that hack­ers and attack­ers can­not sim­ply mod­i­fy the Word­Press con­fig­u­ra­tion and take over the blog. It is impor­tant that no more than four or five char­ac­ters are used and that the pre­fix ends with an under­score.

The keys can eas­i­ly be gen­er­at­ed at https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/ and copied into the file.

Step 6 files upload

Now all unzipped files are uploaded via ftp. If you know how to do this, you can go direct­ly to step 7.

Also here are dif­fer­ences with­in the web­hosters. Usu­al­ly you first have to spec­i­fy in the admin­is­tra­tion area of the web­hoster which direc­to­ry the URL should point to. It makes sense to place a blog in a sep­a­rate sub­di­rec­to­ry. If you only want to have one blog, you can sim­ply choose the top direc­to­ry.

This option can be found in a menu item called domain assign­ment or sim­i­lar. In HostEurope’s KIS, for exam­ple, the path is:

KIS Pro­duk­tver­wal­tung > Web­host­ing > Kon­fig­uri­eren > Domains > Domainzuord­nung

or in the case of web­go:

web­go Web­space-Admin > Paket-Ver­wal­tung > Domain­ver­wal­tung

Sub­se­quent­ly, an ftp user must also be cre­at­ed in the admin­is­tra­tion area of the web host.

In HostEurope’s HIS you can get there by fol­low­ing:

KIS Pro­duk­tver­wal­tung > Web­host­ing > Kon­fig­uri­eren > Web­space & Nutzer > FTP-Zugänge

or in the case of web­go:

web­go Web­space-Admin > Zusatz FTP Benutzer

Note: The domain assign­ment changes may require 15 to 30 min­utes to take effect. FTP users, on the oth­er hand, are usu­al­ly active imme­di­ate­ly.

When you cre­ate an FTP user, you spec­i­fy which direc­to­ry the user is allowed to access. It depends on the web host whether gen­er­al access to all direc­to­ries is pos­si­ble or whether access can only be grant­ed to indi­vid­ual direc­to­ries.

In any case, the ftp user must have access to the direc­to­ry to which the domain ref­er­ences.

If the domain is rout­ed to the direc­to­ry /www/blog, then the ftp user must also be acti­vat­ed for this direc­to­ry.

The Word­Press files can now be uploaded using an FTP pro­gram. FileZil­la is a good pro­gram here, but of course any oth­er pro­gram works as well. In this pro­gram a con­nec­tion to the serv­er has to be estab­lished.

The serv­er used to set up the con­nec­tion depends on the web host. Often the web hosters already spec­i­fy the serv­er when cre­at­ing the ftp user.

At Hos­tEu­rope the serv­er is e.g. wp1234567.server-he.de, at weg­bo s123.goserver.host. The respec­tive num­bers are to be replaced by the own pack­age num­bers. User name and pass­word are the same, as just under ftp-User were cre­at­ed. You don’t have to spec­i­fy a port, since both the FTP pro­grams and the web­hosters now use stan­dard ports.

Impor­tant: The index.php file of the Word­Press instal­la­tion must be at the top lev­el of the URL.

Who has copied the Word­Press instal­la­tion into the stan­dard direc­to­ry of the web­hoster must now delete the index.html. This is the “con­struc­tion site page”, which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed to show that a web­site is acces­si­ble.

Step 7 Finish installation

The instal­la­tion of Word­Press is com­plet­ed by open­ing the URL in any brows­er. If every­thing has been done cor­rect­ly, you go through a few instal­la­tion steps and the blog is ready.

If you have not mod­i­fied the wp-config.php file before, you will be asked for the data­base, the user and the pass­word. In detail it looks like this:

After­wards anoth­er win­dow appears with the note that one can log in now.

Don’t for­get to delete the index.html if it still exists in the direc­to­ry. Word­Press uses the file index.php.

 

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