GETTING STARTED WITH

WORDPRESS HOSTING

An introduction to our managed WordPress platform and WordPress basics.

Contents

Introduction 3 Chapter 1: Completing your WordPress installation 4
Chapter 2: Migrating an existing WordPress website to us 6
Chapter 3: WordPress Tools 8
Chapter 4: WordPress Staging 11
Chapter 5: Further help and next steps 13

A WORDPRESS PLATFORM LIKE NO OTHER

Welcome to Hosting Unlimited

Congratulations! You’ve just registered for one of the world’s fastest and most advanced WordPress web hosting

platforms.

This Getting Started Guide is designed to help you learn more about WordPress

and how to build, manage and maintain your website easily.

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) with a huge range of potential uses. Although it originally started out as a blogging platform, it can be used to create anything from ecommerce stores to magazines. It has hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes so you can create a website that truly stands out from the crowd. This guide has been written specifically for our WordPress Hosting service. If you’re using our regular shared web hosting and want to install WordPress, please take a look at our Web Hosting Getting Started Guide first and come back to this guide after you’ve used our WordPress one-click installer. If you encounter an issue at any point or you’re not sure what to do next, please raise a ticket in MyH-Un and our friendly support team will help you out. To get started with WordPress, please log in to your H-Un account before continuing with this guide.

CHAPTER ONE

Completing your WordPress installation

Simply by signing up for our WordPress package, you’ve already nearly completed your install. All that’s left to do is choose some preliminary settings via the WordPress Welcome screen. The WordPress Welcome screen gives you a short introduction to WordPress and has a few fields for you to complete before your installation finishes:

• Site Title - Don’t worry too much about what you put here; you can easily change your title later on from your WordPress dashboard.
• Username – This is the default administrator username for your WordPress install. Never use the username ‘admin’ (or a variant of) for security reasons.
• Password – Type a strong password or generate one using the password manager software of your choice.
• Your email address – Double-check for typos as WordPress will email you with all the details you need for your new WordPress website. Your email address can be changed later on, so if you’re setting up and configuring WordPress for a client, we recommend you enter your own email address for this part.
• Privacy – We suggest leaving the ‘Allow my site to appear in search engines like Google and Techno- rati’ box checked even if you’re not going to put your site live for a while. This is because it can take a long time for search engines to find, crawl and index your site even after you adjust the setting again in WordPress later on.
A good workaround is to use a maintenance mode plugin (e.g. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-main- tenance-mode/) to work on your website without the rest of the world being able to see it. Plugins are covered in Chapter 3 of this guide. After you’ve filled out the fields, click the ‘Install WordPress’ button. You’re ready to go! If you’re creating a brand new WordPress website, now skip to Chapter 3: Building and managing your new WordPress website.

If you want to transfer your website from Joomla!, Drupal, or another CMS to your new WordPress install, import your content and then continue to Chapter 3 of this guide. If you want to transfer your existing WordPress website to your new WordPress install, continue to Chapter 2.

CHAPTER TWO

Migrating an existing WordPress website to Hosting Unlimited

Important: If your WordPress website is currently hosted with a different provider, please ensure you

have an up-to-date backup of your WordPress data and database before beginning the migration process. The following methods work regardless of whether your original WordPress website is hosted with us or with another provider. There are two ways to migrate your existing WordPress install:

1. Migrate your content using WordPress’s import and export tools
2. Use a WordPress migration plugin.

1. Using WordPress’s import and export tools

Important: This method will only migrate your WordPress content (posts, pages, comments and

uploaded media), not the full install.

1. Log in to your old WordPress dashboard and choose Tools > Export. Select the content you wish to export, and download it.
2. Log into your new WordPress dashboard and choose Tools > Import > WordPress to import your old content. If you have access to FTP for your old WordPress install, you can log in and go to wp-content/themes to download your old themes, and re-upload them to your new install.

2. Using a migration plugin

There are a variety of free migration plugins in the official WordPress plugin directory, located at https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/. The majority are compatible with our hosting, but we recommend using WordPress Move (https://en-gb. wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-move/).

1. Install the migration plugin by logging into your existing WordPress website, then choosing ‘Plugins’ > ‘Add new’.
2. Search for the migration plugin of your choice, click ‘Install’, and then activate it on the same screen.
3. Follow the creator’s instructions for site migration (this will usually involve going to ‘Tools’ and/or ‘Settings’ in your WordPress dashboard and following the instructions).

CHAPTER THREE

WordPress Tools

Our WordPress Tools suite offers a range of powerful tools to make it easier to manage WordPress sites. Instead of having to log in to the WordPress dashboard for each site, you can manage themes, plugins and more from within MyH-Un. The WordPress Tools menu is accessible through Manage Hosting, then ‘Managing’ a particular site. A video introduction to WordPress Tools can be found here: https://H-Un.co.uk/2UmxA7q.

Version Checker

This shows the version of WordPress that you’re running. If we detect that the version is not up-to-date, you’ll be notified and the UI will present the option to update the core version to the latest stable release. It’s important to keep WordPress updated for security reasons and to ensure you can use the latest plugins.

WordPress Admin

This is a simple link that takes you into WordPress. If you’re already logged into WordPress then you’ll be directed straight into the dashboard.

Reinstall WordPress

This allows you to perform a full WordPress reinstall, wiping the site files and database in the process and replacing them with a brand-new WordPress installation. Use with caution: you’ll need to tick a box to confirm that you want to do this.

Plugins Here you can manage all of your WordPress plugins: you can activate/deactivate them and update them if necessary.

Themes This will show you a full list of current themes that are installed, their versions and which are active. Similar to the Plugins area, you have the option to activate, deactivate or update themes.

Users The Users tool makes it easier to manage WordPress users. It will show a list of all users along with their name, username and their role. You can add new users by entering the relevant information, selecting the desired role and selecting Create Account. As well as standard WordPress roles, custom-created roles will also appear here.

Settings This tool allows you to make changes to the Site and Home URL, the site title and the site tagline.

Staging A one-click WordPress staging environment. See the next chapter for detailed information on our staging tool.

Wordpress Checksum

This checks the core files of the WordPress installation and determines if they match those of the official WordPress core repository. If the files have been modified, then you’ll be notified. If the check fails and modified files are found, then a next step would be to check the on-demand malware scanner to ensure the installation has not been infected.

CHAPTER FOUR

WordPress Staging

20i WordPress Hosting includes a WordPress Staging tool that gives you a way to make changes to your website in a safe staging environment -without impacting your live site. Once you’re happy with your changes, you can migrate them over to your live site, seamlessly. A video demonstrating Staging can be watched here: https://H-Un.co.uk/2uAmA80. It’s part of the WordPress Tools suite, available when you go Manage Hosting and Manage an individual hosting package.

Creating the Staging Site

To begin the staging process, select the Staging icon:

Once on the WordPress Staging screen, select Create Staging Site. Your current site will then be cloned onto a staging subdomain, i.e. staging.yourdomain.com. This will take a few minutes to complete. Once your site has cloned onto the staging subdomain, you will now have access to edit the staging site without having an impact on the live site. To view the staging site, select Visit Staging.

Editing the Staging Site

To edit the staging site files, you can use either File Manager or via FTP. A newly created staging_html directory will have been created. This is where the cloned files are stored and where you need to go to edit any site files. To edit the database, you can head to MySQL Databases and you will see a newly created SCSTAGING database which you can login to via phpMyAdmin. The site and home URL for the WordPress site will be prefixed with the staging subdomain.

Cloning the Staging Site to Live

Navigate back to the WordPress Staging page. Tick the checkbox to ‘confirm this will overwrite my existing, live website data’. Select Clone into live. This will take a few minutes to complete. Once completed, any changes you’ve made to the staging site will have been replicated onto the live version of your site.

CHAPTER FIVE

Further help and next steps

The WordPress community has a wealth of valuable tools and services available for free, including:

• A complete codex: https://codex.wordpress.org/
• A comprehensive official theme directory: https://wordpress.org/themes/
• An extensive plugin directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/
• A highly active support community: https://wordpress.org/support/
Beyond that, there are dozens of active WordPress tutorial, news and video websites run by WordPress evangelists. If you’re interested in learning more about what you can do with WordPress, here are some websites to check out:

• WP Beginner: http://www.wpbeginner.com/
• Winning WP: http://winningwp.com/
• WP Mayor: http://www.wpmayor.com/
• WP Kube: https://www.wpkube.com/
• WP Lift: http://wplift.com/
• WP Shout: https://wpshout.com/
• WordPress Tavern: https://wptavern.com/
• WPMU Dev: https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/16