How to Make a WordPress Website: Ultimate Guide for All Users – Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced

Getting WordPress installed via WP-CLI

Installing WordPress manually is all fine, but we can make things a lot more streamlined by employing our good old friend, WP-CLI.

🛍️ Bonus: At the bottom of the page, you’ll find a roundup of all the WP-CLI commands used throughout this guide. Something you can copy and paste into your records.

ℹ️ In case you don’t know, WP-CLI is a command line interface for WordPress. It adds a whole range of WordPress commands on top of what’s already available in the standard Unix command line.

Installing WordPress via WP-CLI has a couple of advantages:

• You can craft your own unique sequence of commands and reuse them multiple times to spin up new sites.
• The process is also much much quicker – you’re not only not getting slowed down by the WordPress UI, but shell commands also take less time to reach their destination and get executed.

⚠️ Note; the steps described below start with you having an SSH connection established with your host.

First things first, let’s make sure that you indeed have WP-CLI installed on your server. Run this command:

wp --info

You should see the WP-CLI status screen.

💡 Note; out of our top recommended web hosting choices for WordPress, SiteGround, Bluehost, and WP Engine all have WP-CLI installed by default.

If you don’t have WP-CLI installed, you can still add it yourself to most servers. Here’s how to do that.

To install WordPress via WP-CLI, start by going to the directory path where you want to get your site installed. Next:

wp core download

• downloads WordPress

wp config create --dbname=your_db_name --dbuser=your_db_user --dbpass=your_db_password --dbhost=localhost

• creates a new wp-config.php file

wp db create

• creates the database based on the details set by the previous command

wp core install --url=YOUR_DOMAIN.com --title="SITE TITLE" --admin_user=ADMIN_USER --admin_password=ADMIN_P4SS --admin_email=YOUR@EMAIL.com

That is it! The whole process takes just a couple of seconds once you get the hang of it. Establishing an SSH connection is probably the longest part.

Using WP-CLI to launch a template WordPress site

Just as we did when installing WordPress, using WP-CLI is the most effective and fastest way to configure a new site.

Here are some basic commands you can use:

wp plugin delete hello

• gets rid of the hello plugin

wp theme install THEME-SLUG --activate

• installs and activates a theme

wp plugin install PLUGIN-1 PLUGIN-2 --activate

• installs and activates multiple plugins in one go

Example use:

wp plugin install advanced-custom-fields code-snippets redirection --activate

wp site empty

• deletes all posts, pages, and comments from a site – a nice way to make sure no default content stays on your site after installation

wp site empty --uploads

• deletes everything from the uploads directory as well

wp post generate --count=10

• creates ten empty posts for testing

Even if you only want to get rid of the dummy content and install a couple of plugins, it’s still going to be much quicker to do so via WP-CLI.

It’s up to you to create your ideal sequence of WP-CLI commands to get the exact set of plugins, themes, and starter site content that you need. Here’s the full directory of WP-CLI commands to pick from.

Automate basic website settings

Setting up a new site is usually a sequence of the same steps every single time.

Why not automate it?

Again, our good friend WP-CLI comes to the rescue! Here are some useful commands you can employ:

Set permalinks

wp rewrite structure '/%postname%/'

Add user accounts

wp user create author_username author@example.com --role=author --user_pass=yourpassword
wp user create editor_username editor@example.com --role=editor --user_pass=yourpassword

Make sure the site is visible to Google

wp option update blog_public 1

Set the site’s title and tagline

wp option update blogname "Your site name"
wp option update blogdescription "Your site description"

Enable / disable comments

wp option update default_comment_status closed

Or:

wp option update default_comment_status open

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

wp option update default_ping_status closed

Set the correct time zone

wp option update timezone_string "America/New_York"

💡 The scope of what you can adjust doesn’t end here. Go ahead and take a look into the wp_options table in the WordPress database. You can adjust any setting by using the wp option update command. Here are the docs. Check it out and create your own sequence of WP-CLI commands to automate your WordPress website setup.

Customize your theme via WP-CLI

Note; if you haven’t installed your theme yet, scroll to the previous section where we covered how to do that with WP-CLI.

Let’s now customize your theme in a semi-automatic way.

Remember the wp option update command that we used when discussing your site’s core settings? You can also use it for theme settings.

Most WordPress themes – if not all of them – store their settings in the wp_options table in the database. This means that you can modify those options – pre-set them – using the wp option update command.

Unfortunately, something that can’t be avoided is that you have to do the initial setup and customization manually, via the wp-admin. But then, you can reuse those settings and roll them out to new sites with the help of WP-CLI.

Once you have your theme installed and customized, browse through the wp_options table with phpMyAdmin, and look for the individual option settings. Based on those settings, create your unique sequence of wp option update commands that redo them one by one. Use that on new sites.

Install your original set of must-have plugins

While every WordPress website can benefit from an original set of plugins, there are still some plugins that you’ll want on all sites. This usually involves things like SEO, backups, Google Analytics, caching, image optimization, security, contact forms, plus a couple more probably.

You most likely already have a pretty good idea as to what your must-have plugins are, so I’m not going to push any individual plugins onto you (maybe just a couple). Instead, let’s focus on what’s the quickest way of having them installed.

Again, no surprise, this method is going to be WP-CLI.

We already covered the main commands to get new plugins installed a couple of sections above. Just to remind you, they are, for example:

wp plugin install advanced-custom-fields code-snippets redirection --activate

This single line alone will install three popular plugins and activate them in one go.

With that done, you can also use WP-CLI to pre-configure plugins. Again, this is done through the wp option update command – the same one we used for configuring your favorite theme.

💡 At the beginning of this guide, I also mentioned an alternative way to roll out a basic WordPress website with a given collection of presets, themes, plugins, etc. Instead of using WP-CLI and going command by command, you can also use the Duplicator plugin and handle everything in one go. I advise you to test both approaches and see which works better for your workflow.

Some extra plugins to consider making your must-haves

Some of these you already know, some might be new:

Admin and Site Enhancements (ASE)

Improves the WordPress admin area with features like dashboard customization, REST API disabling, and login attempt limits. In my view, this is the plugin that Jetpack always wanted to be.

ACF

Do I even have to advertise this one to you? It’s the best solution out there for adding custom fields to WordPress edit screens, enabling tailored content management workflows.

Simple History

Logs and displays recent changes in WordPress, including post edits, logins, and plugin-specific actions, for easy tracking.

WP Reset

Lets you quickly reset the WordPress database to its default state, with options to create and restore snapshots for easy site recovery.

Code Snippets

Great plugin for adding custom code blocks to your functions.php file, the stylesheet, or for creating new custom shortcodes.

Just add the snippet through this plugin, enable/disable it as needed, and, most importantly, keep your snippets regardless of any theme or plugin updates you’re making over time.

Optimole

There are many image optimization plugins in the WordPress directory. Optimole stands out (built by our sister company).

Here are some of the things it does that no other plugins do (or, at least, they don’t offer all these features in the same package):

• images are optimized in the cloud and then replaced on the front-end on the fly
• you keep all original versions of your images in the media library
• picks the right image size based on the visitor’s device and screen size
• serves all images via CDN
• uses lazy loading by default
• makes your images up to 85% smaller with no visible quality loss

We can create those pages in a couple of ways. Fist, our favorite, WP-CLI:

Create template pages in bulk using WP-CLI

“In bulk” is the keyword here. We’re going to roll out a whole range of example pages in one go.

The command to use is this:

wp post create --post_content="$(cat SOME_PAGE_TEMPLATE.txt)" --post_type=page --post_title='Page Title'

As you can see, this command takes content from a file and creates a new page based on it.

To use this method of page creation effectively, you can create a range of files for different pages, and then roll them out one by one. For example:

wp post create --post_content="$(cat about.txt)" --post_type=page --post_title='About Us'
wp post create --post_content="$(cat contact.txt)" --post_type=page --post_title='Contact'
wp post create --post_content="$(cat privacy.txt)" --post_type=page --post_title='Privacy Policy'

Create dummy blog posts in bulk

While getting a new WordPress website rolled out, having some dummy blog posts for early testing can be useful.

The fastest way to create those is via WP-CLI.

To start, you can use a command I shared earlier:

wp post generate --count=10

This creates ten empty posts.

But if you want to do something cooler, you can use this:

curl http://loripsum.net/api/4 | wp post generate --post_content --count=10

This one creates ten posts, but this time each one has four paragraphs of dummy text in it.

Need 100 posts? No problem. Need ten paragraphs instead of 4, no problem. Just adjust the parameters.

Bonus: All WP-CLI commands in one place

We’ve gone through loads of different WP-CLI commands along the way as we were making a WordPress website. Here they are all in one place, save them for future use:

(In case you need explanations of what these commands do, please refer back to the previous sections in this guide.)