Install WordPress on your web hostingWith the WordPress Toolkit in Plesk

Published on October 20, 2026

Prerequisites

For a WordPress installation, you need three things: web hosting, a domain that points to this web hosting, and access to Plesk. You get all three automatically after ordering - the web hosting is provisioned in around 120 seconds, and you then reach the Plesk access directly from the customer interface.

You do not have to create a database beforehand. The WordPress Toolkit creates the database and database user itself during installation. How to connect the domain is explained in the guide Connect a domain to your web hosting.

Storage requirement: a fresh WordPress installation takes up around 100 MB. Space only becomes relevant through images, plugins and backups - guidance in the guide How much web space do I need?.

Does it have to be WordPress at all? For a small site that is rarely updated, the website builder is often the more suitable route - it requires no updates. The trade-offs are in Builder or WordPress.

Installation via the WordPress Toolkit

1. Log in to Plesk and open WordPress in the menu on the left.
2. Click Install.
3. Select the domain under which WordPress should run. If the site should be reachable directly under yourdomain.com, the directory field must stay empty - an entry such as blog would put the installation at yourdomain.com/blog.
4. Set the site title, language and the administrator credentials. Deliberately do not choose a user name such as admin, and use a long, random password - both are the most common attack surface with WordPress.
5. Under the advanced settings, you can check the PHP version. For a new installation, choose the latest version offered.
6. Click Install. After about a minute, the site is reachable and appears as a card in the Toolkit overview.

The first steps after installation

You should take care of three settings straight away, before you start with the content:

• Enable and enforce SSL. You set up the free certificate from Let's Encrypt in Plesk; then you switch both addresses to https:// in WordPress under Settings > General. Details in the guide Set up an SSL certificate.
• Change permalinks. Under Settings > Permalinks, switch from the default setting to Post name. Descriptive URLs are much better for search engines and can only be changed later with redirects.
• Allow search engines. Check under Settings > Reading that the option "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is not set - otherwise the finished site stays invisible.

Updates, hardening and staging

The real strength of the WordPress Toolkit shows after installation. In your site's card, you will find, among other things:

• Updates: core, themes and plugins can be updated centrally, automatically if you like. You should definitely have core security updates applied automatically.
• Hardening: a check lists typical weaknesses - such as reachable configuration files or active file editing in the backend - and fixes them with a click.
• Cloning: with this, you create a complete copy of your site, usually on a subdomain. On this staging copy, you test larger updates, a new theme or a plugin change without endangering the live site.
• Copy data: you then transfer tested changes from the copy back to the live site.

Before every major intervention, the same applies: take a backup first. How that works via the Plesk backup manager is described in the guide Create and restore backups.

Manual installation as an alternative

If you take over an existing installation or deliberately want to control everything yourself, the classic route works too:

1. Download WordPress from wordpress.org and unpack it.
2. In Plesk, create a new MySQL database including a user under Databases and note the credentials (see Create a database).
3. Upload the files via FTP or the file manager into the domain's document root - usually httpdocs.
4. Open the domain in the browser. The WordPress installation wizard asks for the database details and writes wp-config.php itself.

You can add manually installed sites to the WordPress Toolkit in Plesk afterwards and then manage them just as conveniently.

Typical errors and their cause

• "Error establishing a database connection": database name, user or password in wp-config.php are wrong. As a rule, localhost belongs in the host field.
• White page after an update: usually a plugin or theme conflict. Rename the affected plugin folder via FTP - this deactivates the plugin and makes the backend reachable again. How to narrow down the culprit systematically is shown in the guide Fix WordPress errors.
• Memory errors or aborts during import: the memory limit and maximum upload size can be raised in Plesk in the domain's PHP settings.
• Mixed content despite SSL: old http:// addresses remain in the database. A search-and-replace plugin or an SQL update via phpMyAdmin cleans that up.

Frequently asked questions