In general, hosting providers offer:

• Generic hosting, meant for different web applications (including WordPress, but also other software as well)
• WordPress-specific hosting

WordPress-specific hosting providers offer a platform designed for installing WordPress, or even pre-installed WordPress. They may also offer additional features such as backups, updates or developer tools.

See the subsection Hosting providers for more information and provider suggestions.

Technical requirements

Please refer to this page with the recommended server software. The page is updated with the latest minimum requirements to run WordPress. You’ll also find a pre-written letter you can use to contact a potential hosting provider.

If your server is not configured properly, your site may not function as intended, or you won’t be able to install WordPress. This is why ensuring your server meets the technical requirements is essential.

If you are new to WordPress, it may be a good idea to have your site hosted by a provider with experience in WordPress hosting.

Hosting providers

Hosting is a commodity these days and with a little digging, it’s easy to find a hosting provider that fulfils the aforementioned requirements. If you’re looking for hosting suggestions, have a look at the following resources:

• WordPress Recommended Hosts – these hosting service providers support WordPress, in more ways than one.
• Searching the WordPress support forums for recommendations.
• Chat with your local community WordPress meetup members and ask what they think!
• Chat with the Make WordPress community via Slack.

WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO).

However, once you start using various WordPress Themes and customizing WordPress to meet your own needs, you may break some of those useful search engine friendly features. To maintain your WordPress site’s optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, here are a few tips:

Good, Clean Code

Make sure your site’s code validates. Errors in your code may prevent a search engine from moving through the site successfully.

Content Talks

Search engines can’t “see” a site. They can only “read” a site. Looks do not talk to a search engine. What “talks” to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”.

Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind

How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be “found” on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favor with search engines.

Content First

A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.

Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content

Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your “score.”

Content in Links and Images

Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.

Link Popularity

It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. This still holds weight with search engine favoritism. It’s about who links to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress. These help you link to other people, which gives them credit, but it also helps them link to you, connecting the “links.” The number of incoming links your site has that have been recognized by Google can be checked by typing link:www.yoursite.com into Google (other search engines have similar functions). Other ways to generate incoming links to your site include:

• Add your site’s url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
• Submit your site to directories (see below).
• Note: Leaving comments on blogs will not help with this, since all modern blogging tools use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Don’t be a comment spammer.

Good Navigation Links

A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

Get the Blog Indexed in Google Search

Before getting to the details on how you can get Google to recognize you, we need to first understand these three terms:

• The Googlebot: This is the software used to search that is used by Google to gather new information that has been uploaded online so that it can be fed on Google pages. Once information that you had uploaded is picked up by this software, then it can be found on Google pages.
• Crawling: This is the process where the above named software, Googlebot, roams from site to site detecting any new information to be uploaded on Google. This software works by going through new links that have been uploaded recently and which are generating a lot of traffic.
• Indexing: Once the information has been gathered by the Googlebot through the process called crawling, it is processed through another process called indexing. It is through this process that the quality of content is determined so that they can be placed appropriately on Google pages. The question now is, how exactly does Googlebot find this information? Firstly, it starts by siting the web pages that it had cited in the previous search. It then detects new pages associated with those old ones or just new ones all together. More details on the same would be found on Search Console help for those who are interested in the same. Any new information is cited with the help of sitemaps and links that lead to those articles.

Search Engine Site Submissions

There are many resources that will “help” you submit your site to search engines. Some are free, some for a fee. Or you can manually submit your site to search engines yourself. Whatever method you choose to use, once your site has been checked for errors and is ready to go, search engines will welcome your WordPress site.

Here are some tips for successful site submissions:

• Make sure you have content for search engines to scan. In general, have more than 10 posts on your site to give the search engines something to examine and evaluate.
• Do not submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month or longer, depending upon their criteria, not your anxiousness to be listed.
• Have ready to type, or copy and paste, the title of the site, and the categories your site may belong to in a search engine directory.
• Have a list of your website’s various “addresses/URLs” ready. You can submit your root directory as well as specific categories and feeds to search engines, expanding your search engine coverage.
• Keep a list of the various search engines and directories you submit to so you do not accidentally resubmit too soon, and you can keep track of how they include you among their pages and results.

Directory Sites

It is also useful for traffic generation and search optimization purposes to submit your site to directories. Both comprehensive directory sites and those specific to the subject or localisation of your site can be used.

Search Engine Optimization Resources

While WordPress comes ready for search engines, the following are more resources and information you may want to know about preparing and maintaining your site for search engines’ robots and crawlers.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

The WordPress Custom Fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and Pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Robots.txt Optimization

Search Engines read a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt to get information on what they should and shouldn’t check.

Adding entries to robots.txt to help SEO is popular misconception. Google says you are welcome to use robots.txt to block parts of your site but these days prefers you don’t. Use page-level noindex tags instead, to tackle low-quality parts of your site. Since 2009, Google has been evermore vocal in its advice to avoid blocking JS & CSS files, and Google’s Search Quality Team has been evermore active in promoting a policy of transparency by webmasters, to help Google verify we’re not “cloaking” or linking to unsightly spam on blocked pages. Therefore the ideal robots file disallows nothing whatsoever, and may link to an XML Sitemap if an accurate one has been constructed (which itself is rare though!).

WordPress by default only blocks a couple of JS files but is nearly compliant with Google’s guidance here.

See also:

• How Google Crawls My Site
• How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?
• WordPress Robots.txt example and explanation from Yoast
• Using robots.txt for SEO
• Removing duplicate search engine content using robots.txt
• wikipedia – Robots.txt

Feed Submissions

WordPress comes built-in with various feeds, allowing your site to be viewed by various feed readers. Many search engines are now accepting feed submissions, and there are many site which specialize in directories of feeds and feed services.

To submit your site’s feeds, you need to know the link to the various feeds your site provides. The article WordPress Feeds lists the various links of the feeds that come built into WordPress.

For information on customizing these links, see the article on Customizing Feeds.

Permalinks

Permalinks are enhancements to your existing URLs which can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like <nowiki>http://example.com/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/</nowiki> rather than <nowiki>http://example.com/index.php?p=423</nowiki>. See Using Permalinks for more information.

As search engines use links and the title as part of their information gathering, links to posts and articles within your site gain importance with Permalinks.

Sitemaps

A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the posts on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a blog post quickly but it also has great benefits in the search engines as a good link is always pointing to all your blog posts. By having a link to your sitemap on all your sites pages both visitors and search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts.

Google Sitemaps

As of June 2005, Google is now accepting sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML. You can find more information about Google’s Sitemap Submissions from Google, and the discussion on the WordPress Forum about WordPress and Google Site maps.

Some utilities have been created to help the WordPress user to create a Google site map of their site for submission to Google. For more information on these and Google sitemaps:

• Inside Google Sitemaps (Official Google Blog)

Link Relationships

There is some debate over whether listing the link relations actually effect search engine ranking however it is simple to implement.

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Password Problems

For information on problems logging in due to a wrong or lost password, see Resetting Your Password. Remember: the Username and Password fields are case-sensitive.

Enable Cookies

In order to make sure that cookies are enabled for your browser, you need to:

1. Clear your browser cookies.
2. Clear your browser cache.

To see how to clear cookies and caches on various browsers, visit Clearing Cache and Cookies.

Check your Firewall

Some firewalls (e.g., eTrust Personal Firewall) block you from logging in to WordPress. Disable your firewall and try to log in again.

If All Else Fails

If these steps fail, please indicate that you have tried all these possible solutions when posting at the WordPress Support Forum. 

Be sure to give details of your server setup, if you know it, including MySQL and PHP versions, as well as your operating system (OS), browser, and the WordPress version that is causing these problems.

APS (Plesk)

If you’re using the Plesk control panel, you have two options: one-click quick install or custom install which allows you to configure things like installation path or database prefix. Both these options are available regardless of whether you have WordPress Toolkit enabled or not. However, special security measures are applied during installation only if WordPress Toolkit is enabled. If you don’t have WordPress Toolkit, your WordPress installations will have the same security as manual WordPress installs.

1. Log in to your Plesk account and go to Applications tab. The Featured Applications screen will open.
2. Click Install next to WordPress if you want a one-click quick install, or click the drop-down arrow next to Install and click Custom if you want to change installation parameters.
3. If you chose quick installation, no need to do anything else, as your WordPress blog has already been installed. If you chose custom installation, change the settings you want and click Install.

Fantastico

1. Log in to your cPanel account and click on the Fantastico (or Fantastico Deluxe) option.
2. Once you enter Fantastico, on the left hand side there is a Blogs category under which you will find WordPress. Click on it.
3. Click on the New Installation link in the WordPress Overview.
4. Fill in the various details and click Submit.
5. That’s it, you are done!

• Fantastico Home Page

Installatron

Installatron is a one-click web application installer that enables WordPress and other top web applications to be instantly installed and effortlessly managed. WordPress installations managed by Installatron can be updated (manually or automated), cloned, backed up and restored, edited to change installation parameters, and more.

Many web hosting providers include Installatron through their web hosting control panel. If Installatron is not available from your provider, you can use Installatron directly from Installatron.com.

Here’s how to install WordPress through your web hosting provider’s control panel:

1. Log in to your web host’s control panel, navigate to “Installatron,” click WordPress, and choose the Install this application option.
2. Change any of the install prompts to customize the install. For example, you can choose a different language for WordPress.
3. Click the Install button to begin the installation process. You will be redirected to a progress page where you can watch as WordPress is installed within a few seconds to your website.

Here’s how to install WordPress using Installatron.com:

1. Navigate to Installatron WordPress and choose the Install this application option.
2. Enter your hosting account’s FTP or SSH account information, and then enter MySQL/MariaDB database information for a created database. For increased security, create a separate FTP account and MySQL/MariaDB database for your WordPress installation.
3. Change any of the install prompts to customize the install. For example, you can choose a different language for WordPress.
4. Click the Install button to begin the installation process. You will be redirected to a progress page where you can watch as WordPress is installed within a few seconds to your website.

• Installatron Home Page

Softaculous

1. Log in to your host and look for Software/Services.
2. In Softaculous, there is a Blogs category. Collapse the category and WordPress will be there. Click on it.
3. You will see an Install TAB. Click it.
4. Fill in the various details and submit.
5. That’s it, you are done!

• Softaculous Home Page