How to Install WordPress on SiteGround (A Step-By-Step Guide)

SiteGround is a reputable hosting company that offers an excellent choice for launching a new WordPress blog, website, or even an online store. It also happens to be one of the recommended hosting providers featured on WordPress.org. If you choose to sign up for one of their hosting plans, then you’ll also need to learn how to install WordPress on SiteGround without any hassles or surprises. That’s exactly what we’re going to give you in the sections below.

More specifically, we will cover the following:

Although the initial setup shouldn’t take you very long, we do recommend bookmarking this post. That way you can quickly reference it later if you don’t get through the whole process in one take.

With that said, let’s get into it:

How to create a new SiteGround account

Before we get into how to install WordPress on SiteGround, you first need a SiteGround account. If you already have one, you can click here to go to the next step.

Signing up for SiteGround follows a similar process to most hosting companies and it begins with you going to the SiteGround homepage, which will look similar to what you see below:

SiteGround

SiteGround offers three plans that come with various features that you can choose from, based on your needs. Simply click on View Plans to access them.

We advise carefully looking at these so that you pick the plan that will best meet your expectations. For example, if you already know that you plan to launch more than one WordPress site, then that automatically excludes the StartUp Plan, since that plan only supports one site.

Once you’ve read through the features and decided on the plan you want, click the Get Plan button:

SiteGround pricing

The next step will ask you to pick a domain name – this is the address where your website will live on the internet. For instance, themeisle.com is the domain name of this website, and you can see it in the address bar of this page.

The nice thing about SiteGround is that they are not only a hosting company, but they also offer domain name registration. This means they won’t send you to some third-party website to register the domain name you want.

Now, if you did happen to buy a domain name on another website before starting the registration process with SiteGround, you can also specify that, and they’ll help you bring it over to their platform.

Or, you can just keep the domain name at your original registrar and point it to your SiteGround hosting:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround step three: choose a domain name

💡 Themeisle tip: If you don’t have a domain name yet, or the one you had in mind is already taken, then head on over to our sister website, DomainWheel. It’s a free domain name generator that uses a sophisticated AI system, to help people just like you, come up with their perfect domain name.

When you finish with the domain name step and click continue, you’ll land on a review screen. Here, you’ll add all of your personal information in order to create your SiteGround account. Then you’ll enter your payment details:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround step four

When you get to the bottom, don’t forget to review the Purchase Information panel. This will show you the plan you picked and how much it will cost:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround final step

Truth be told, you really should pay attention to everything here because it ultimately ties back to what your needs are. You want to ensure that the purchase you’ll be making will be able to adequately meet those needs. Having said that, we did want to draw your attention to two specific line items:

  • Contract length. Most hosting companies will give you a better price if you commit to a longer contract. To get the best deals, many of them will ask you to commit to a three-year contract. In contrast, SiteGround will extend you a healthy discount in exchange for only a one year commitment. This is a much appreciated perk.
  • Optional extras. SiteGround also offers the option of pre-purchasing additional services during the check out. These are things like domain privacy and a monitoring service to keep a continuous eye on the health of your website.

💡 Themeisle tip: From the available add-on items, we do suggest that you consider paying a little extra for the domain privacy feature. It hides your personal details on the very public WHOIS database. That may not seem valuable to you now, but as your site grows in popularity, malicious individuals could potentially use that database to find out that you are the site owner. They could then use your contact information to harass you directly.

When you finish deciding on everything, you can click confirm, and your payment will be processed.

That’s it!

Pretty simple, right?

You can now begin to install WordPress on SiteGround!

How to install WordPress on SiteGround

Due to its immense popularity, most hosting companies provide fast ways to install WordPress on their servers. SiteGround is no exception to this.

In the next two steps, we’ll show you how to install WordPress on SiteGround in only a few minutes. It’s relatively straightforward, so let’s get to it:

1. Log into SiteGround and create a new site

Once you log into SiteGround with your credentials, you’ll notice a dashboard. The menu at the top is how you’ll be able to navigate between different areas of your account:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround and create a new site: step one

Depending on your plan, SiteGround might automatically launch the website installer tool. But if it doesn’t, you can easily access it yourself.

To launch a new WordPress site, click the link that says Websites. It will take you to a new page that should show your current list of servers. From here, you’ll need to tap the Site Tools button:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround and create a new site: step two

This will take you to another dashboard that should look similar to what you see below:

SiteGround Dashboard First Page

From here, you can either click on the large Install and Manage button with the WordPress logo, or you can click on WordPress on the left hand side menu, and when the submenu opens up, click on Install and Manage from there. Both roads lead to the same destination:

As soon as you click on either one, you’ll be invited to install WordPress, as can be seen below:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround and create a new site: step four

You’ll also notice a few new fields that will need to be filled out. In the next step, we’ll show you how to navigate your way through them.

2. Set up your new site and create admin credentials

The new site creation area has two components. The first of these is the domain name, which should already be auto-populated with the domain you registered when you signed up:

How to install WordPress on SiteGround and create a new site: step five

Underneath this, you’ll be asked to provide a unique username, password, and email address. The email part is obviously the easiest, but you’ll want to think carefully about the other two – particularly the password.

  • Username. Going with the default “admin” choice is a rookie mistake to make, as it makes you the perfect target for ambitious hackers. Choose something unique that you’ll remember, but that won’t be obvious to someone trying to break into your site.
  • Password. You should always choose a strong password and test it out. If you want, you can also use SiteGround’s own password generator to help you. Regardless of how you come up with your password, be sure to save it using a reliable password manager. If you lose it, you might not be able to get back into your site.

The last thing you’ll notice on this page is the checkbox at the bottom, which will ask you if you want to install the WordPress Starter plugin:

WordPress starter plugin box

Although not required, we recommend you leave it checked. It’ll make things a little easier as you continue to make your way through the setup process. Once you tap the Install button, SiteGround will work its magic, and that’s pretty much it. That’s how to install WordPress on SiteGround. From there you’ll be able to go to either the WordPress dashboard or view the (empty-for-now) site:

Install complete

Keep in mind that this What’s next? message won’t be here every time you log in, which means you’ll need to access your WordPress website via a different way. We’ll cover that next!

How to set up your WordPress site with SiteGround

Upon installing WordPress on SiteGround, the real work of creating your WordPress website begins. The one minor downside to using SiteGround compared to some other hosting companies (e.g. – Bluehost), is that it doesn’t have a dedicated area for installing themes and plugins.

Notice we said minor downside. It’s because you can easily install both themes and plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard, so it’s not something to stress over.

The next thing to do is to actually get to that WordPress dashboard. The way to do that is by looking to the bottom of the Websites screen. There you’ll see the WordPress installations on the current server:

Manage Installations

To log into WordPress from there, use the right arrow icon under the Actions column:

WordPress SiteGround login

This will transport you to the WordPress dashboard, and from there you can start the process of working on your website:

Using the WordPress starter

Remember that checkmark we recommended you leave checked?

That’s what this is.

If you left the checkmark checked, then it means you ended up installing the WordPress Starter plugin from SiteGround. When you first log into your site, that plugin will walk you through the setup process using a step-by-step wizard:

Starter wizard

The first prompt you’ll be given is to choose a theme for your WordPress site.

Installing themes

One way to think about WordPress themes is that they are like the outward physical appearance of your website. They are primarily responsible for the aesthetic look that you want to portray to your audience. In some instances, they can also include some functional aspects as part of their design.

Some of the typical components of a WordPress theme include typography (this is the font), color schemes, responsiveness (this is the ability to adapt to different size screens), and the layout (this is the presentation of the text, photos, columns, sidebars, etc).

Due to the widespread adoption of WordPress as the most popular way to build a website on the internet*, there have been thousands of themes created for users to choose from.

That’s great news for you, because it means you’ll have no shortage of options.

The themes range from very simple, one page themes, to premium themes with all the bells-and-whistles to match.

One of our favorites that we recommend to almost everyone is our very own Neve theme. Naturally, we think our theme is great because we know what it’s capable of, but in case you are skeptical of us recommending our own product, you don’t need to take our word for it. In fact, we encourage you not to only take our word for it. Please go to the official WordPress theme repository and check out the Neve stats for yourself.

As the saying goes – the numbers don’t lie – and as of right now, more than 300,000 websites have Neve installed, with the average rating from more than 1,000 reviews being 5 out of 5 stars.

*WordPress runs 43% of all websites on the internet. Again, that is all websites [1].

Neve Theme

While the free version of Neve might be enough for many beginner WordPress users to get started, the premium Neve Pro version really takes things to the next level. If you want to invest in your website’s success and be a step ahead of your eventual growth, then you may want to consider upgrading to Neve Pro:

Neve Pro

The other nice thing about it, is that if you are already a little bit familiar with WordPress, then it’ll be very easy for you to learn your way around Neve’s back-end.

That’s because it uses the native WordPress Customizer that’s already built into WordPress itself. There’s no need to rely on difficult-to-use third-party admin panels or editing panes when making adjustments to your site’s design.

Neve customizer

Of course you aren’t obligated to use Neve, and if you do want to check out some other themes, then the WordPress Starter plugin will let you search through countless options. Once you find one that you like, simply click the Select button to move on to the next step:

Choose theme

If you decided not to rely on the SiteGround WordPress Starter plugin, then you can always install a theme through the WordPress dashboard. Also, if you install a theme and realize afterwards that you would prefer a different one, then read our tutorial on how to change a WordPress theme to help you get back on track.

Adding plugins

As we mentioned, the theme you end up choosing will be largely responsible for the way your site looks, but what about the way it functions?

🔌 Say hello to WordPress plugins.

The easiest way to think about plugins, is that they are additions to your site that augment its functionality somehow. The reason this is useful is because if you aren’t a web developer who is proficient in code, then you won’t be able to customize your WordPress site to do things you want it to do.

Plugins are able to fill that need and there are plugins available for almost everything you can possibly imagine. As of the time of this writing, there are actually about 60,000 plugins in the WordPress repository.

You will certainly not need anywhere close to 60,000 plugins to launch your WordPress site, but there are a few that we recommend for almost every site:

  • Security plugins such as Wordfence to protect your site from malicious hackers.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) plugins to help improve the search rankings of your posts. Examples include Yoast SEO, The SEO Framework, and SEOPress.
  • Website optimization and image optimization plugins to help improve your load time. Our own Optimole plugin is a great choice for this.
  • Contact forms to let your visitors get in touch. Ninja Forms, WPForms, Gravity Forms, are all solid choices.
  • Backups are important if you ever need to reinstall WordPress. UpdraftPlus is a well-known backup plugin that works well for this.
  • A Swiss-army knife plugin that does a lot of useful things at once. Lighthouse is a perfect choice for this category.

Keep in mind that just like with themes, plugins also have free options and paid, premium options. In most cases – especially when you’re first starting out – free plugins are capable of doing most of the things you’ll need. You can install them directly from the WordPress dashboard on the Plugins > Add New page:

Add new plugins

Simply use the search bar to find the plugin you want, install it, and activate it. Not to sound corny here, but it really is as easy as one, two, three.

Search. Install. Activate.

It’s that simple.

You can also add premium plugins here too, using a dedicated uploader. We have a complete guide to adding plugins to your site if you want to dive deeper into it.

Besides our suggestions above, the SiteGround WordPress Starter plugin also provides some plugin recommendations as you make your way through the setup wizard:

Starter choose plugins

However, we recommend just skipping this part because as you saw, you can install the plugins you need later, directly from the WordPress dashboard. It’s better to start with a clean slate when it comes to your site, and add to it strategically.

Creating posts and pages

After you establish the foundation for your site, you’ll need to start thinking about adding content. To do that, you can click either the Pages > Add New link or the Posts > Add New link on the left side of the WordPress dashboard:

Add new posts

In a practical sense, you can use either option to publish content to your site. However, there are some differences between them, particularly their intended purpose:

  • Pages are used primarily for static content that rarely gets updated. These would be your about me pages, contact us pages, start here pages, and so on.
  • Posts are used for blog-style content that can be more time-sensitive and require updates to ensure that the information presented doesn’t go stale.

If you want to dive even deeper into this topic, then check out our article on the difference between pages versus posts. As for the pages, although each site is unique, most will include the following as a baseline:

  • A homepage is often the very first page visitors see when they land on your website. To actually keep them on your site, you’ll need to make your homepage engaging and show them that your site is aligned with their search intent and their interests.
  • Contact pages are self-explanatory. They provide a way for your site visitors to contact you. Depending on the nature of your website, this could include a phone number if you’re a business, an email address, social media accounts, or other contact methods.
  • About Me pages are also self-explanatory. Your visitors will want to learn more about you. This is where you share your story, as well as your value proposition, which is the reason why they should be listening to you. Remember that even though it’s called an about me page, it really needs to be about them, your audience. What is it about you, your background, and what you talk about on your site that will bring them value.
  • A Services page is optional and mainly used by websites that sell products or offer services. If you’re going to be mainly blogging, then you won’t need this.

Once you finish setting up your core pages, you can starting working on your content, and adding to the design of your site. Keep plugging away at it, learn about different growth strategies, and over time you will hopefully see success.

Final thoughts on how to install WordPress on SiteGround 🏁

In this post we reviewed how to install WordPress on SiteGround – one of three recommended hosting companies on the WordPress.org website.

👉 Once you register your account, it’s fairly straightforward to complete the setup process and install WordPress. From there, you can build a blog, launch a website, start an online store, or build whatever kind of online presence you’d like.

WordPress and SiteGround are very flexible and beginner-friendly to work with so the web is your oyster. Now that you have the knowledge, it’s up to you to take the first step. 🚶

Do you have any questions on how to install WordPress on SiteGround that we didn’t answer? Leave them in the comments below.

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