WordPress on Hostinger: The Only Setup Steps I Bother With

If you've ever opened a WordPress setup guide, you know the problem: forty steps, half of them outdated, three of them dangerous. Most creators bounce off WordPress because the entry process feels overwhelming.

Here's the entire list of setup steps I actually run on a fresh Hostinger WordPress install. Seven steps. Once you do these, you can ignore every other "essential" tutorial.

1. Install via Hostinger's auto-installer

Don't manually download WordPress. Use Hostinger's one-click WordPress installer in the control panel. It picks the right PHP version, sets the database, configures the admin account. Done in under a minute.

2. Set the site title and tagline

Settings → General. Change the site title to your actual brand name. Set the tagline to one sentence that explains what the site is about. Most themes display both prominently, and the tagline is also what shows up in some search results.

3. Set permalinks to "Post name"

Settings → Permalinks. Change from the default to "Post name" (just /your-post-title/). The default uses ugly query strings; "Post name" is the only choice that's good for SEO and readable for humans. Change this before you publish anything — changing later breaks all your URLs.

4. Delete the sample content

WordPress installs with a "Hello World" post and a sample page. Delete both. They never go away if you don't actively delete them, and they look unprofessional if anyone stumbles onto them.

5. Install one (1) caching plugin

Hostinger's LitSpeed servers are fast, but a caching plugin makes them faster. LiteSpeed Cache plugin is the obvious choice — it's free, it's made by the same people who made the server, and it has zero meaningful configuration to learn. Install, activate, leave the defaults alone.

6. Set up Yoast or RankMath for SEO

Pick one. Don't install both — they conflict. Yoast is the more popular choice; RankMath is the more feature-rich. For a starting site, either is fine. The point is having any SEO plugin installed so your post titles and meta descriptions are easy to set when you write.

7. Connect a custom domain (and turn on SSL)

If your domain is at Hostinger, this is one click in the control panel. If it's elsewhere, you point the nameservers and wait an hour. Then turn on SSL — Hostinger gives you a free Let's Encrypt cert. Click the toggle. Don't skip this; modern browsers warn visitors about non-HTTPS sites.

That's it

That's the whole setup. Seven steps, maybe twenty minutes. You can ship a real WordPress site on a real domain with all the basics handled, and skip the next forty things some tutorial says you "need" to do.

Plugins, themes, widgets, page builders — those are decisions you make as you build the site, not as part of setup. Get the seven done. Start writing. Add the rest only when you hit a real wall.

— Jeff