Installing WordPress and Your New Theme at Bluehost

Choosing a Hosting Provider

Choosing the right hosting provider to house your WordPress website is a incredibly important decision. Poor preforming hosting will load slowly, crash regularly, and cause you endless headaches. For this reason we advise you to pick carefully.

We strongly recommend choosing Bluehost. Bluehost has been a strong supporter of the WordPress revolution from the beginning. In fact it’s the only major hosting provider that’s been continuously promoted on the wordpress.org website’s hosting page.

For a limited time you can get hosting at Bluehost for 40% off. + Get a free domain name!

Get 40% Off Hosting »

Why should you choose Bluehost?:

1. Support: If you’ve read any of my theme roundups you’ll know that I place an over-sized emphasis on the quality and consistency of the support provided by each theme foundry. When it comes to hosting I think it’s even more important. You are a business person with a ton of skills earned from the school of hard knocks… but you’re not a sysadmin and you shouldn’t have to master the complicated skills of managing a WordPress compatible server. This is were Bluehost shines. Let there team of support experts and sysadmins tweak your hosting environment into perfect form so you can keep your eyes on the really important things like running your business.
2. WordPress Friendly: Bluehost has a special relationship with the WordPress community. They’ve been proactive in creating tools and security features to support the many hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites that have emerged on the web over the past decade. For this reason and many others the WordPress foundation has listed bluehost on their recommended hosting page even when all other hosts have been removed for various infractions and compatibility issues.
3. Unlimited Hosting & Domains: While there’s a little small print that makes this claim not entierly true in all cases, it’s essentially true for most small businesses. And that’s an awesome thing!! You can host as many websites and as many domains on your account as you’d like and this makes Bluehost the ideal webhost for any business person with ambition.
4. Up-time & Stability: There are website where you can find statistics on the various up-time and stability metrics for all the major hosting providers. But I’m going to speak from years of experience working with hundreds of clients with hosting at just about every hosting provider you can think of. Bluehost constantly offers the most stable, easy to work with, and least prone to down-time hosting of any shared hosting provider.
5. Price: See the offer above!! 40% off is no trivial discount on a hosting cost that’s one of the lowest in the industry to begin with.

Signing up for your hosting account:

When you follow the button above you’ll find yourself on the Bluehost signup page where you’ll want to click the get started now button:

Next look for the three level comparison boxes that outline your hosting options. You’ll notice that on the far left is an option to purchase hosting for as little as $3.49 called the Starter package. If you’re only ever going to host and develop this one website then this may be the perfect option… on the other hand, if you’re like most people you may find that the greater flexibility and much less constrained scalibility of the Plus option will be far better fit. For this reason we generally advise all of our clients and readers to start with the Plus level hosting account.

Choose Your Free Domain

The next step is choosing your free domain. This can be trickier than you may think as many of the generic term domains have been scooped up over the last few decades. For this reason you’ll need to be creative. Try to think of ways to keep your domain short and relevant and avoid using hyphens whenever possible as they tend to diminish a domains feel of legitimacy.

It’s also a good idea to try to include an important keyword or key-phrase in your domain if you can. Try to brainstorm up a handful of important terms that will play a central role in your SEO keyword pyramid. Start adding prefixes or suffixes to your terms and look for other ways to modify the terms or build on them to create an attractive and memorable domain.

Once you’ve found a domain where you want to host your public website, enter it into the domain field below to check for availability:

This will bring you to the final checkout pages where you’ll provide your contact and billing information and activate your new hosting account.

Install WordPress

Now that your hosting account is active we get to the fun parts. First we need to install WordPress and this is superbly easy since you’ve picked Bluehost as your hosting provider. It’s only going to take a few minutes to complete so your website is almost online.

Log into Bluehost and navigate to your cPanel. Next, scroll to the section titled “MOJO Marketplace” and choose the “One-Click Installs” button.

This will take you to another page with a collection of applications you can choose from. Since we’re looking to install WordPress, you can select the button with the WordPress icon on it.

Next you’ll want to select the “Start” button to begin the installation process.

Then choose the domain where you want WordPress installed.

And finally you’ll approve the terms and conditions and select the “Install Now” button.

The rest is automated… Once WordPress is fully installed, a message on-screen will provide you with your site URL, the admin login URL, your username, and password. You are now ready to log into your dashboard and install your new WordPress theme!

Install Your New Theme

There are two ways you can install your new WordPress theme. WordPress offers a fully functional theme installer that works well, or you can use FTP to manually load the theme files. While many people rely on the WP core theme loader, we strongly recommend setting up FTP with you host and proceeding with the manual route. This options has the added benefit of allowing you to delete and or access the theme files should a conflict arise that blocks your access to the WordPress admin dashboard.

FTP:

1. Find your FTP credentials or request them from your hosting provider and use them to connect to the server via a FTP client like FileZilla.
2. Unzip your theme on your desktop and ensure that you’ve removed any outer directories such that you only have one container filled with the core theme files.
3. On the server side of your FTP client navigate to the location /wp-content/themes.
4. On the local side of your FTP client navigate to the folder containing your theme directory.
5. Drag your theme folder from the local directory into the /wp-content/themes location on the server.
6. Navigate on your WordPress dashboard to Appearance >> Themes >> choose your new theme from the tiled list, and then select the activate option.

WordPress Core Uploader:

1. Navigate on your WordPress dashboard to Appearance >> Themes >> Add New, then click Upload Theme at the top of the page. Locate and upload the theme (still in .zip format) from your computer and click Install Now. The theme will be installed/unpacked.
2. Go back to the Appearance >> Themes page and choose your new theme from the tiled list, and then select the activate option.. You’re good to go!