How-to · Beginner · 10 minutes
How to Install WordPress
Get a working WordPress site answering on your domain inside ten minutes — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
In a line: get a working WordPress site answering on your domain inside ten minutes — a beginner-level task that takes 10 minutes.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Skill needed
5
Stages to finish
Free
Help included
Tested
On our own kit
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 10 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The route, start to finish
From start to finish, you will open the softaculous installer in cpanel, set the domain and the path, choose credentials that mean it, finish up and sign in and do the first five settings.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
The mistake nearly everyone makes
Leaving the directory field on its default and installing into a subfolder by accident. The site ends up at /wp, the homepage returns a 404, and the cause is one box nobody read on the way past.
It is worth learning because it is not some rare edge case — it is the single most common reason this task turns into a support ticket. Knowing it up front turns the whole job from risky into routine.
The tip we hand out to everybody
Tick the installer's auto-update and auto-backup boxes while you are on that screen. Two clicks at install time head off the two most common WordPress disasters before the site has any content to lose.
Small habits like this are the real difference between people who find hosting easy and people who find it stressful. The tools are identical; the working method is not.
How our platform shortens this
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
The hosting this guide is written against
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Bring an existing site and we shift it across at no charge — usually inside 24 hours, with nothing going dark while we work.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Scoped honestly
Get a working WordPress site answering on your domain inside ten minutes is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets 10 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Open the Softaculous installer in cPanel
The installer creates the database, puts the files where they belong and writes the configuration in a single pass. The old manual five-minute install is now the slower of the two routes by some distance.
- 2
Set the domain and the path
Install to the root of the domain by leaving the directory box empty, unless you actually want the site to live at yourdomain.com/blog. This is the field people skim past and regret.
- 3
Choose credentials that mean it
Pick an admin username that is not 'admin' and let the installer generate the password. This login is the door every bot on the internet will spend the next decade knocking on.
- 4
Finish up and sign in
The installer hands you a link to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. Bookmark it now, because that address is where everything you do from here onwards begins.
- 5
Do the first five settings
Set the timezone, switch permalinks to Post name, delete the sample post and page, and check the site title. Five minutes of housekeeping that every later job quietly depends on.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is there any reason to install WordPress by hand instead?
There is nothing left to gain. The installer performs the same official install with fewer chances to fumble a step. Doing it by hand still makes sense for unusual directory layouts, or for learning what the installer is doing on your behalf.
Which plugins should go on a brand new install?
Far fewer than the listicles suggest. LiteSpeed Cache, which comes bundled with our WordPress hosting, an SEO plugin and a forms plugin cover most sites completely. Every extra plugin is something you now have to maintain, so add on need.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
What if the site outgrows the plan I bought?
You move up in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to whole dedicated servers. Growing becomes a line change on your account rather than a hunt for a new host.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
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