Beginner's Guide: How to Install Joomla (2021)

To build a Joomla website or blog, you will have to install Joomla first before proceeding with the rest of the steps.

Learning how to install Joomla gives you knowledge on what Joomla installation is like, and the information needed!

In this JovialGuide, we will show you how to install Joomla (2021).

Since this is a lengthy JovialGuide, we have provided you with a navigation to take you to the section of your choice.

Setup Your Hosting Account

Setup Your Hosting Account

How to Install Joomla (2021)

How to Install Joomla via Softaculous
How to Install Joomla Manually
How to Install Joomla on Android
How to Install Joomla in a Subdirectory
How to Install Joomla in a Subdomain
Things to do After Installing Joomla

Setup Your Hosting Account

Since you will need a Joomla hosting to install Joomla, then we recommend A2 Hosting (see review) for Joomla hosting. We recommend them because they are secure, reliable, fast and affordable.

Choose a Plan

To setup your hosting account with them, visit A2 Hosting. When it opens, you will see their Joomla hosting plans. Choose the one you want.

Since you are building a Joomla website, we recommend the StartUp plan (or any other plan) because it is affordable, and recommended for new or small websites.

Choose a Domain Name

After you have selected the plan that you want, you will be asked to choose your domain.

You can transfer your existing domain from another registrar to A2 Hosting, register a new domain name or use an existing domain and update the nameserver.

Configure your Plan Options

On this page, you will be presented with configuration options and paid services.

Select the options you need and click the Continue button to proceed.

Review Your Details

This page allows you review all of the configurations you did.

Once you have reviewed and confirmed everything, click on the Checkout button to proceed.

Checkout

On the checkout page, fill out your account password, billing address, personal information, and choose your preferred payment method.

For payment methods, A2 Hosting accepts different payment options, such as: America Express, Visa, Mastercard, etc., choose one that is most comfortable to you.

After you have confirmed everything, click on the Complete Order button and your A2 Hosting account will be setup.

How to Install Joomla via Softaculous

To install Joomla via Softaculous, log-into your Joomla hosting cPanel.

If you have not gotten a Joomla hosting yet, we recommend A2 Hosting.

When you are on the cPanel page of your Joomla hosting account, locate the “Software” or “Softaculous Apps Installer” section and click on “Softaculous Apps Installer”.

After that, under the “Top Scripts” section, click on “Joomla”.

This will open up a page containing details about Joomla and your hosing server. To start installing Joomla, click on the “Install Now” button.

On the “Software Setup” section of Joomla installation, select the Joomla version you would like to install. The latest version is completely recommended for security reasons.

After that, choose the protocol of your choice. Basically, there are four different protocols. Namely: the http://, http://www, https:// and the https://www. If your Joomla website uses SSL – Secure Socket Layer, then choose any of the HTTPS protocols.

Next, in the domain field, select the domain that you would like to install Joomla to. For example: example.com.

For the subdirectory field, leave it empty, because we are installing Joomla to the root domain and not in the subdirectory.

On the “Site Settings” section, enter your Joomla “Site Name” and “Site Description” into their fields.

After you have done that, on the “Database Settings” section, select if you would like to import sample data. If not, select “None”!

For the “Admin Account” section, enter your preferred Admin Username, Password, Real Name and Email.

For Joomla security reasons, use password combinations that are difficult to guess, and also use an Email address you still have access to.

On the “Choose Language” section, go ahead and select the language of your choice.

After that, click on the “Advanced Options” section, and other options will toggle show.

Start by entering a database name to be created for the installation. Or you can leave the generated database name.

Next, enter a table prefix or leave the automatically generated one. If you are entering a table prefix, make sure it is 5 character long, and ends with an underscore (_).

For “Auto Upgrade”, for security reasons, select “Upgrade to any latest version available (Major as well as Minor)” so that it will automatically upgrade Joomla when there’s a major or minor release.

Now select a backup location where your Joomla backups will be saved.

After you are done, confirm everything from the top.

Once you have confirmed everything, click on the “Install” button and wait for the wizard to install Joomla for you.

If the wizard installs Joomla successfully, then you will see a success message that says “Congratulations, the software was installed successfully”!

Congratulations! You just installed Joomla via Softaculous.

How to Install Joomla Manually

In this section, we will show you how to install Joomla manually.

Before starting the installation of Joomla manually, do note that the manual installation of Joomla is divided into 3 stages. Namely: Configuration, Database and the Overview stage.

After extracting Joomla manually to where you want to install it to, enter the full URL of the path into your web browser.

Main Configuration Stage

On the “Configuration” stage of Joomla installation, you will find Main Configuration and the Super User Account Details’ sections.

Start by selecting your preferred language. For the sake of this JovialGuide, we are choosing English (United States).

On the “Main Configuration”, enter your sitename into the Sitename field, and a short description (of your site) of 20 words in maximum into the Description field.

The Site Offline option lets you set your Joomla website offline for maintenance. In this case, we don’t want it to be offline. So, the Site Offline option will be No – for the website to be online.

After that, on the “Super User Account Details”, enter your Email address (one you still have access to), Username, Password and Confirm Password (enter the same password you used for the Password field into the Confirm Password field) into their corresponding fields.

Make sure you write them down and keep them save, because you will use them to log-into your Joomla website, and also to retrieve your login detail(s) if you forget.

You can always change these details at the backend of Joomla after installation.

Note – the fields marked with asterisk (*) are most important, and cannot be left empty!

Once you are done, click on the “Next” button to proceed to the Database Configuration stage.

Database Stage

The “Database” stage is the stage that you will configure your Joomla database using the details provided by your Joomla host. If you do not know your Joomla database details, contact your hosting support team for assistance.

If you have your Joomla database details provided to you by your hosting provider, go ahead and select the Database Type, enter Host Name, Username, Password, and the Database Name into their corresponding fields.

After that, enter a table prefix into the Table Prefix field (four to five character long, and must end with an underscore), or use the randomly generated one.

For the old Database Process, it lets you either backup or remove any existing tables from the previous Joomla installation, which has the same Table Prefix as the one above. So, select the Remove option to remove it, if it exists.

After you are done, click on the “Next” button to proceed to the next stage.

Overview Stage

The Overview stage is the last stage in the Joomla installation. It presents all of the configuration details you entered from the Configuration to the Database stages, and also allows you setup some other configuration settings.

Sample Data are already created, or ready-made contents that are installed to a Joomla website to simplify the building processes. For the Install Sample Data configuration under the Finalization section, select “None”.

For the Email Configuration option under the Overview section, select the Yes option. Once it is selected (yes), another configuration option – “Include Passwords in Email” will appear. For security reasons, select No, so that your password will not be included in the Email that will be sent to you.

The Main Configuration section displays all of the details you entered in the Main Configuration stage, except your password details. While the Database Configuration section shows all of the database configurations you entered in the Database Configuration stage, except your database password.

The Pre-installation Check section shows you if your hosting server meets the minimum requirements to run Joomla. And for the Recommended Settings, it displays all of the recommended settings to ensure full compatibility with Joomla.

If any setting is marked “No” in the Pre-installation Check section, do contact your Joomla host for assistance.

If you find out that you missed any configuration setting, you can easily go back and correct it/them by clicking on the Previous button above or below the page.

After you have confirmed everything, click on the “Next” button for the wizard to run the process.

If you see “Congratulations! Joomla is now installed”, then you just installed Joomla manually!

On this same page, you will see an extra step to install new language, administrative login details, and other things.

Before we can continue, we will have to remove the installation folder for security purposes.

To remove the installation folder, simply click on Remove “Installation” Folder and the installation folder will be removed automatically.

Access and Log-into the Joomla Backend

After installing Joomla, the next thing to do is to log into the backend of your Joomla website so that you can start building a Joomla website.

The admin log-in page of your Joomla website could be accessed by adding /administrator to the end of the URL. For example, If your Joomla homepage URL is example.com, adding /administrator to the end of example.com, it becomes example.com/administrator.

Once you type in the correct Joomla login page URL, you will be presented with a page like the one below.

Now, to log into your Joomla website, enter your correct Joomla admin username and password (the ones you used while installing Joomla manually), and click login.

How to Install Joomla on Android

Joomla is not only installed on a liveserver or computer (localhost), it can also be installed on Android locally!

You can easily build a Joomla website or blog locally, by installing Joomla on your Android device. This is done by following the right steps.

In our JovialGuide, we detailedly explained how to install Joomla on Android.

How to Install Joomla in a Subdirectory

Apart from installing Joomla on Android, you can also install Joomla in a subdirectory.

You can easily install Joomla In a subdirectory by following the right steps.

One of our detailed JovialGuide’s, shows you how to install Joomla in a subdirectory.

How to Install Joomla in a Subdomain

Joomla can be installed in a subdirectory, as well as in a subdomain.

Installing Joomla in a subdomain allows you have another website running ontop an existing domain. For example; store.example.com – store is the subdomain, while example.com is the primary domain.

If you prefer to install Joomla in a subdomain rather than in a subdirectory, then our JovialGuide shows you how to install Joomla in a subdomain.

Things to do After Installing Joomla

Below, we will show you the things to do after installing Joomla.

Create a Contact Us Page

You have to create a contact us page to collect feedbacks from your Joomla users.

In our detailed JovialGuide, we explained how to create a contact us page in Joomla.

Change Sitename (Site Title)

You will want to change the sitename of your Joomla website if it doesn’t meet your preference.

To change your sitename, see things to do after installing Joomla.

Create an FAQs Page in Joomla

You can easily create an FAQs page in Joomla to answer the most frequently asked questions of your users.

This is most useful if you run a service-based Joomla website.

In our detailed JovialGuide, we explained how to create an FAQs page in Joomla.

Learn Joomla

To boost your Joomla knowledge, you have to learn Joomla!

To learn Joomla, you may want to see our detailed JovialGuide on:

Futhermore, you may want to see the complete things to do after installing Joomla.

We hope this JovialGuide shows you how to install Joomla (2021).

See other of our Joomla tutorials for more.

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