Our WordPress Hosting, Installation & Settings Training Course explains the ins-and-outs of WordPress hosting, and how to install and configure WordPress for optimal use.
We launch ourselves into the wonderful world of WordPress with this online class designed to bring you up-to-speed on the hosting and installation requirements of WordPress, plus how to set up some of the more obscure options in WordPress to ensure a more pleasant and stress free web designing experience.
We explore the various hosting options available to you, and how to avoid making any major mistakes regarding your hosting. We then move on to talking about the installation process, and how modern hosting companies manage this effectively, and finally we take you on a tour of the most important WordPress settings to get correct from the outset, so you can avoid problems later.
WordPress can be a demanding beast, server-wise. It uses a mySQL database for data storage, which means that it usually has to perform routine database operations i.e. calls to the database for information, for example to retrieve the text for a particular page, or to check a users login details. Each of these database operations uses up bandwidth, and if you have a popular and busy website, this can mean that page load times can be seriously effected. Have you ever waited ages for a page to load? Then you'll know what we mean.
The situation can get even more dire if you are trying to update the website yourself during a busy period. You will especially notice the load times slowing down, to say nothing of what your visitors will see (or not see i.e. pages not loading) while this is going on.
This is all down to the type of WordPress hosting your website is using. The space your website is located in, and the company that supplies it, may not have optimised for WordPress. Most hosting companies can offer WordPress hosting, but that doesn't mean their hosting is any good. There are good WordPress hosts, and there are great WordPress hosts (there are of course bad WordPress hosts too, but we didn't see much point in saying that).
So how do you find and choose a good WordPress host? All of that is covered in this online class.
It was only a few years ago that, in order to install WordPress, you had to go through a somewhat complex and convoluted process; downloading and uploading the software, messing about with ZIP files and setting up blank mySQL databases. The whole process was messy and overly confusing, and it was very easy to make mistakes. Take it from us: it wasn't fun. We did it the hard way for years.
Mercifully in recent years, hosting companies seem to have finally gotten the message, and the general trend now is to offer what many of them call One-Click WordPress Hosting. Hooray! Nowadays most hosting companies offer this (and if your host doesn't, we would say that's a red warning flag) and it makes the process of installing WordPress so very much easier. The process then usually involves allocating some space for the website (under a domain name, or a sub-domain) and clicking the aforementioned One-Click button, wherever it may be hiding. And lo-and behold (hopefully) your website should magically be installed! A few hosting companies have taken things even further, by offering free WordPress plugins they have developed themselves which optimise your WordPress website to work even better on their servers.
During this course, we discuss all of the hosting options open to you, and demonstrate the installation process by setting up a fresh copy of WordPress for you to experiment with, and how you can install it yourself in the future.
Using your new sparkly clean install of WordPress, we explain how some of the basic settings of WordPress work, which (in our experience) are vital to get right from the start, in order to avoid problems later. Like any software, WordPress has it's quirks, which can be difficult to understand, and to track down and modify or correct later. Our guide to some of the more esoteric settings in WordPress will ensure that you are ready to forge ahead in your web designing with confidence.
