I have set up many, and I mean many, WordPress sites now. I tried to count how many but it’s impossible to remember how many now.
Over the years I have gotten into a little system for how I set up fresh installs of WordPress. From my go to WordPress plugins and their settings, to even the web hosting platform I use.
Apart from the Life Hacker Guy blog, I have recently decided to use WordPress when developing my E-commerce website for my Super Greens supplement brand. Having a really robust, secure and fast WordPress install is important for not only a well functionality site that’s easy to manage but it has to deliver a great experience for visitors.
Here is my guide to doing a fresh install of WordPress, let’s start with who I choose for buying domain names and web hosting.
Registering Domain Name
I have used a number of domain name registrars over the years and have found Namecheap to be the easiest to use. The costs are fairly similar with the popular domain registrars although I find Namecheap a little cheaper the first year.
I have written about buying a domain name in my post here.
Once you have purchased your domain you can manage this within the Namecheap control panel.
You can use their DNS services or change the nameservers to point to your web hosting company or even other third party services.
WordPress Web Hosting
My go to webhosting company is SiteGround and have used them for the last 4 years as they have superb support.
Their prices for the first year (or two if you go for this option) are really competitive from $3.95 per month for their one-site starter package to $11.95 for the GoGeek unlimited sites with their Geeky/Premium features.
Many of the budget hosting companies like GoDaddy and 1and1 can be a lot cheaper but I find they tend to overload accounts with many sites and the support is not too responsive.
Installing WordPress
With most hosting packages you have cPanel as standard, which makes setting up all aspects of your website very straight forward.
You can auto-install WordPress using a one-click install from cPanel.
I am a bit old school in that I like to manually set up WordPress so that I get a “clean” install without any additional plugins the hosting company may wish to also install.
To do this you can head over to the WordPress.org website and simply download the latest version of WordPress. At the time of writing this post the current version is 5.2.2.
Once downloaded I use FTP to upload the WordPress files to my hosting space.
This can take a few minutes depending on your internet connection, and so you can head over to cPanel again to create the MySQL database and user that will be required for WordPress to work.
Setting up MySQL Database and User
This may sound daunting but it's actually fairly straight forward to do and made so much easier thanks to cPanel.
In the “databases” section select the MySQL database icon:
Once you have clicked on the icon you arrive at the setting up MySQL database and user screen, it should look like this:
Choose a name for the your database with no spaces just alphanumerical characters.
Once set up you will need to create a user to access the database.
Make a note of the password as you will need to add this information to a WordPress configuration file later.
Associate this new user to the newly created database.
Lastly, you will need to add permissions to this user so that it can access the database.
Setting up the WP_Config File
In older versions of WordPress you needed to manually edit the wp-config.php file found in the root of the installation. Recent versions are able to do this automatically upon running the installation script.
In either case you will need the information setup above when creating the database and new user.
An excellent guide on doing this can be found on the How to Install WordPress site itself.
Instead of repeating this excellent guide I recommend checking this out.
Basic WordPress Settings
Out of the box WordPress has you mostly covered in terms of set-up but there are few modifications I make for every WordPress website I launch. I will quickly cover these here in each of the sections in the “Settings” tab.
General Settings
Ensure site title is entered in correctly and that the WordPress Address URL and Site URL is correct. If you have already set up the SSL certificate, then you need to ensure this is changed to be https.
Discussion
A couple of options that I toggle on and off here.
Firstly, I always want to be able to moderate a comment before it appears, so I toggle on the:
“Comment must be manually approved”
Next, I ALWAYS remove the option to “Show Avatars” this really slows down the site load speed.
Permalink Settings
You can change the custom URL structure of your WordPress site in this section. I ALWAYS select the “post name” option, so the title of you post is used for the URL.
Must Have WordPress Plugins
One of the benefits of WordPress is the huge library of plugins you have access too, many of which are completely free versions. For some of the more advanced features you may need to upgrade to the PRO paid for versions, but mostly you can get away with the free versions.
With so many plugins available I wanted to highlight the “must have” plugins I use on every WordPress install I set up.
Acunetix WP Security
This plugin is great for two reasons, firstly it can help to remove information displayed on the website front-end (or in the source code) that may reveal install information (such as the WordPress version, php and database error reporting). Secondly, for adding in default index files into folders to prevent information being disclosure to visitors they shouldn’t see.
Acunetix WP Security can also rename the WordPress database table name prefix from the standard “wp_”. This is ALWAYS recommended to make it a little harder for hackers to know your database schema.
One I have ran through the checks I usually disable the plugin and only periodically enable to ensure security is fine.
https://www.acunetix.com/websitesecurity/wordpress-security-plugin/
Autoptimize
As I highlight a few times here, website speed is a big factor for visitor satisfaction and also Google as a search engine ranking factor. So, anything we can do to speed up the load time is a plus.
Autoptimize is a plugin that optimizes CSS, JS, Images and Google Fonts using a couple of nice tricks. One is combining similar files together into one file, thus reducing the number of HTTP requests. These files can then be cached to load even faster.
Another cool feature is to combine, and load Google fonts asynchronously and so reduce wait time for them to load one at a time.
One tiny word of warning though, messing around with the combining JS files into one file can sometimes have unwanted effects. So, it’s best to check site functionality after checking this feature.
All In One SEO Pack
All in One SEO is as the name suggests a plugin that helps to ensure your on-page SEO is setup correctly.
With this plugin enabled you can edit SEO settings on a per post and page basis along with the more advanced SEO settings for the site itself.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
I previously used Yoast SEO but one of their updates last year caused a real issue with it and the fallout put me off using them going forward.
Yoast SEO is still a very popular plugin though, you can check out the pros and cons of both these plugins here.
There is a PRO version available that costs from $68 per single site to $118 for a business license for 10 sites.
Classic Editor
If you prefer the previous classic version of editing posts in the WordPress back-end then you will be glad to be using the “Classic Editor”.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
To easily sync your Google Analytics account to your WordPress site you can use this plugin.
Really easy to setup you simply paste your GA site ID into XXX.
You can see the Google Analytics stats in your WordPress Back-end and also a bunch of other tracking stats too, such as events, AMP and eCommerce tracking.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard-for-wp/
Lazy Load by WP Rocket
Speed is critical these days when viewing any website especially now that over 50% devices used are mobile. Having a well-optimised and fast loading WordPress site can be challenging, but there are some plugins that can help, and this is one of them.
Loading images in one go can slow the loading speed of your website. Lazy Load only starts to load the image when it's visible to the user and so reduces the initial number of HTTP requests.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/rocket-lazy-load/
Redirection
One of most popular redirect plugins for WordPress and used when you need to do 301 redirects on your site.
You may wish to change the permalink of a post or page but don’t wish to cause any 404 errors. Using “redirection” means you can easily set up the 301 redirect in the most efficient way without any coding or messing about with the .htaccess file.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Social Warfare
This is my social sharing plugin of choice as it doesn’t reduce the page load speed like many of the other similar plugins.
In most cases you can simply use their free version, but I find the PRO features give me greater flexibility and it’s not expensive at all, just $29 for a single license (I use the 10-site license as I manage a few sites).
WP-Optimize
This plugin is great for cleaning up and optimizing your WordPress database. A few clicks and you can remove any transient orphan data that’s not needed – including all the old revisions of posts.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/
There is also a PRO version that you can buy from the official website – https://getwpo.com/
UpdraftPlus
Ensuring you have up-to-date backups is essential if you have a WordPress site. You will never realise the importance until your website goes down and you try to recover it.
Hopefully this never happens to you, it has to me on a few occasions – it’s not good!
At the best it’s a few hours of technical backward and forward getting your site up and online again, at worse it’s gone.
Using a WordPress backup plugin like UpdraftPlus can automatic daily, weekly or monthly backups or your WordPress database and files.
I set daily backups for the database and have these emailed and stored in Dropbox and regularly backup the files, each month. This schedule works well in my opinion as you have the most up-to-date version of the database to hand should you need it.
Avoiding WordPress Bloat
It may be tempting to install and try out lots of different plugins and sort you can have a tonne of them installed. Having too much activated can impact on site speed and so any plugins you’re not using should be deactivated.
Even better still, if you’re not using a WordPress plugin I would suggest deleting it!
The Bottom Line
Well done for reaching the bottom of this post, I am glad you stayed with it!
It’s easy to see why WordPress is THE favorite content management software to use. Setting up a website using WordPress is can be incredibly quick and after a little playing with the backend it’s incredibly adaptable.
Let me know if there are any tips and tricks you use when setting up WordPress websites – I would be keen to discover more.
The setup above I find works for 90% of the WordPress websites I set up for either my own use or clients in the past. I hope you found this post useful and helps setting up your next WordPress websites quicker and easier!
Hey Adam, you have suggested AMP plugin for WordPress. Can I also use it for WooCommerce using this tutorial? https://www.cloudways.com/blog/amp-for-wordpress/
Your suggestion would be highly appreciated!