Install WordPress

What you get out of this

When you are done, your company has a real website out on the internet, with a home page, an about page and a contact page. You also have a logged-in dashboard where you add text and images yourself without writing a single line of code. The guide assumes you only have a browser and a phone or a computer. No server, no terminal, no hassle.

WordPress is a publishing tool, meaning a program that keeps track of the pages and the text for you. It powers about four out of ten websites in the world, which means two practical things for you: there are answers to almost every question you can have, and whoever takes over the site later can do so without starting over.

What you need before you start

• A browser on a computer or phone. Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox all work equally well.
• An email address that the company shares, not a private one. If you do not have one yet, take the guide Domain and email first.
• A company name that you have actually decided on, since the name ends up in the web address.
• A logo or at least an image, in PNG or JPG format. If you do not have one, make one in GIMP or Penpot.
• Five to ten sentences of finished text about what you sell. That is the most common reason a site never gets finished, not the technology.
• A payment card or a Swish number if you choose option B below. Option A can be done completely free of charge.

Time and difficulty level

Allow for one hour from start to a site you can show to others, provided the text is already written. The difficulty level is low: everything happens in the browser and every step is a click or a filled-in box. What takes time is not the installation but the decisions, meaning what the page should be called and what should be on it. Set aside another fifteen minutes per week to add news and images.

First: WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

This confuses everyone at the start, and it is worth two minutes. WordPress is free open source software, and you download it from wordpress.org. That site sells nothing; it only hands out the program. If you download it from there, someone else has to run it for you, and that someone is a web host.

WordPress.com is a company that runs the same program for you, in exchange for you creating an account. You avoid dealing with files, updates and backups. There is a free tier, but it gives you an address that ends in wordpress.com and it does not allow you to install plugins. Plugins are small programs that add features, and one of them is the shop feature WooCommerce. Installing plugins requires a paid tier, as of this writing.

Here is how to choose, without thinking any further: if the site will only tell people who you are and how to reach you, take path A and start for free. If you will sell directly on the site with a cart and checkout, take path B, because the shop requires plugins and your own web host is easier to grow in. Path A can be moved to path B later, and the content comes along.

Try it without committing, right in the browser

If you want to get a feel for how WordPress looks before spending a krona, open WordPress Playground. It starts a ready-made WordPress inside your own browser in about half a minute, with no account and no installation. Click around in the menus, write a test post and see how the editor works.

Playground does not save anything permanently. A temporary Playground disappears as soon as you close the tab or reload the page, and what is stored in the browser storage can also disappear if you browse privately or clear site data. Never write real text directly in Playground. Use it as a practice space, not as an archive.

Path A: start on WordPress.com

1. Go to wordpress.com/start and create an account with the company's shared email address. Confirm the email that arrives, otherwise you cannot continue.
2. Enter the name of the site when the question comes up. Use the company name as it is, for example Ljusstakarna.
3. Choose an address. You get suggestions for a free address that looks like yourname.wordpress.com. Take it if you have not bought your own domain yet. If you have your own domain, it can be connected later without the pages needing to be redone.
4. Choose a plan. Click the link to continue with the free level if you only want an information site. If you are going to sell on the site, you need a paid level, because that is where add-ons become possible.
5. Choose a theme, that is, the site's appearance. Take a simple, light theme with a large image at the top. The theme can be changed later in ten seconds, so do not get stuck here.
6. Click Write website or Edit website to get into the dashboard. The left menu with Posts, Pages, Appearance and Settings is the same menu throughout the WordPress world, regardless of where the site runs.

Path B: WordPress on your own web host

A web host rents out a small part of a computer that stays on around the clock. You pay a monthly fee and avoid having your own server. Almost every Swedish web host has a button that installs WordPress for you, and that button is the whole point of this path.

1. Choose a web host where the package description explicitly mentions WordPress or one-click installation. We recommend Oderland or Beebyte; both are Swedish, have web hosting set up for WordPress and store everything in Sweden. The cheapest package at a web host often lacks the WordPress installer and only includes its own site builder, so read what is included before you click through checkout.
2. Buy or connect the domain in the same step. If you already have a domain from Domain and email, choose the option to move an existing domain instead of buying a new one.
3. Log in to the web host's control panel and find the Install WordPress button. It is almost always under a heading called Website, Homepage or Apps.
4. Enter the site title, a username and a password. Do not use admin as the username, because that is exactly the name break-in attempts guess first. Save the password in Bitwarden or KeePassXC right away, before you continue.
5. Start the installation and wait. It takes one to three minutes. When it is done you get two addresses: the site, for example dittforetag.se, and the login, which is the same address plus /wp-admin.
6. Turn on HTTPS. HTTPS means the traffic between the visitor and the site is encrypted, and it shows as a padlock in the browser. At most web hosts there is a button called Enable SSL or Free SSL certificate. Turn it on and choose the option to force all traffic to HTTPS.

Never run the installer a second time on a site that already has content. A reinstall overwrites the database, and all text, all pages and all images are then gone with no way back. If you need to start over, make a backup first and ask someone else in the company to look at it with you before you press the button.

What to set up regardless of path

1. Set the title and tagline. Go to Settings and then General. The site title is the company name. The tagline is one line about what you do, for example Handmade candlesticks in recycled wood. That line shows up in Google, so write it like a human.
2. Set the time zone and language on the same page. Choose Stockholm as the time zone and Swedish as the language, otherwise posts are published with the wrong time.
3. Fix the link addresses. Go to Settings and then Permalinks. Choose Post name. Then the address to a page becomes readable, that is yourcompany.se/about-us instead of an address full of question marks and numbers. If you are on the free tier of WordPress.com (path A), that setting is locked to a higher paid plan, so you have to live with the default addresses.
4. Delete the sample content. A new WordPress comes with a post called Hello world and a page called Sample page. Remove both under Posts and Pages respectively, otherwise they stay there and look unprofessional.
5. Create three pages under Pages and then Add new: a home page, a page called About us and one called Contact. Enter the text you prepared. Publish each page with the Publish button.
6. Point out the home page. Go to Settings and then Reading, choose A static page and point out the page you made. Otherwise WordPress shows a list of blog posts first, which is rarely what a company wants.
7. Build the menu. Under Appearance there is either Menus or the editor for the whole site, depending on the theme. Add the three pages in the order a visitor thinks: home page, about us, contact.
8. Add contact details for real. The company name, the town the company operates in, the company email address and preferably a phone number that someone actually answers. Write out the company's full name the first time, so that all visitors understand who you are.

How to know it worked

Open the site's address in a private window, meaning not the window where you are logged in. You should see your home page with your name at the top, a menu with three choices and no text about Hello world. Click each menu choice and check that the right page opens. Then test the same thing on your phone, because that is where most of your customers will look, and check that the text can be read without zooming.

One last test that reveals the most: ask someone who was not involved in building the site to answer in thirty seconds what you sell and how to reach you. If they cannot, it is the text that needs fixing, not the technology.

If something goes wrong

• You cannot get into /wp-admin and only get an error about the password: click Lost your password? and use the company's shared email address. If no email arrives, check the spam folder and then look for the function to change the password in the web host's control panel; it is under the WordPress installation.
• The site shows a completely white page after you installed a plugin: log in, go to Plugins and deactivate the most recently installed one. If you cannot log in at all, rename the plugin's folder in the web host's file manager, which switches it off automatically.
• The browser warns that the connection is not secure: HTTPS is not switched on or the site still points to addresses that start with http. Switch on SSL in the web host's control panel and then check that both addresses under Settings and General start with https.
• The domain shows the web host's welcome page instead of your site: the name servers have not caught up. A change to where a domain points can take up to a day to take effect, and that is normal. Wait a day before you change anything else, otherwise the waiting time starts over.
• The images refuse to upload and it says the file is too large: reduce the image before uploading. An image 4000 pixels wide from a mobile camera is unnecessarily large for a web page; 1600 pixels is plenty. Shrink it in GIMP and upload again.
• The menu does not show at all after a theme change: menus belong with the theme, and a new theme has its own menu locations. Go to Appearance, open the menu setting and tick the location where the menu should be shown.
• Someone in the company has accidentally changed something and you do not know what: WordPress saves previous versions of every page. Open the page, find Revisions in the settings panel on the right and go back to an earlier version.

What you do next

If you have decided to sell directly on the site, the next step is WordPress and WooCommerce, which turns the site into a store with a shopping cart and checkout. If you are going to take payment online, you then read Payment gateways. Before launch, go through the Legal checklist, because terms of purchase and a privacy policy need to be in place from the very first order. If you want to read more about the tool itself, WordPress is under tools.