Configure Wordpress from Scratch

Table of contents

Recently, we had a severity 1 issue with our production website. The issue was realized on a weekend, and the site was completely unaccessible!

This not only had significant impact on marketing leads, it also affects our SEO efforts (as Google can be quick to realize a non-functional website and de-index it!).

Just as a reference, our favicon was removed from Google’s SERP – and it’s not come back until now. This signficantly affects CTR which would definitely be a ranking factor when Google decides which sites to rank

Google removed Pet Coach SG favicon since it was down for 2-3 days, the favicon was returning 404 during those period

The Solution

The solution – we had to spin up our own wordpress server ASAP, to mitigate the downtime. Here in this article, I’ll step down the steps that we took – for my own future reference, and hope this helps anyone out there too!

Tech Stack

We decided to use the LAMP stack – simply because that was what I was familiar with:

  • Linux
  • Apache
  • MySQL
  • PHP

Furthermore, Linode has a nice marketplace, that already has an image of a linux (Ubuntu) server with the wordpress installation. So we went with this approach for speed!

Spinning up the Linux (Linode) server

Steps are as follows:

  1. I logged into Linode and accessed their marketplace. Selected the Wordpress image installation: Linode Wordpress Marketplace installation
  2. For the configuration, I set it as per the screenshot below Linode wordpress configuration
    • Email: My Personal Email
    • Region: Singapore
    • Plan: Linode 2 (I wanted this size)
    • Prometheus data export: Set to None
    • Root Password: Some hardcore password that you can’t guess
  3. Create the Linode and wait for it to be provisioned
    • Status Provisioning, means it’s still in progress Provisioning the Linode
    • Status Running, means it’s completed Linode successfully provisioned

Configure the Linux (Linode) Server

Once we have spun up our server, we now need to configure it. Steps are as follows:

  1. Access the server using root – via this command ssh root@139.162.23.164 Accessing Linode server as root
  2. Check what our sudo user demowalakaka, is available using this command: cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd list out all users
  3. Update demowalakaka password using this command: passwd demowalakaka, and then entering some secure password: update demowalakaka password
  4. Now access the server using demowalakaka, this is best practice not to use the root user logged in as demowalakaka
  5. Now, we verify that the wordpress installation is correctly installed – by checking availability of wordpress files: Wordpress files exist
  6. Since wordpress files are there, we also check the configuration that is loaded in the current apache server:
    • Run the command apache2ctl - S check the apache wordpress server configuration
    • Inspect the config file of the active configuration to check that the wordpress installation files are placed in the correct location inspect the config file for apache server configuration
  7. Since everything looks like it’s in place, check whether our site is really accessbile via the internet – and it is! default linode wordpress server page

This is great progress so far! We’ve spun up an apache server from scratch, verified the configurations and ensured that the website is accessible from the internet.

So what else is missing?

Installing PhpMyAdmin

So for me – I like the PhpMyAdmin GUI. For this to work, you need to install it. Alternatively, you can always access via CLI via the server, but it’s less intuitive for me.

So I’ll step down how to install PHP My Admin below:

  1. First, we update the server and install phpmyadmin using the following command: sudo apt update && sudo apt install phpmyadmin -y installing phpmyadmin
  2. Next, we need to set the configuration for phpmyadmin:
    • Set the configuration: sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/phpmyadmin.conf
    • Active the configuration sudo a2enconf phpmyadmin
    • Restart apache server to ensure it’s using the latest config sudo systemctl reload apache2
  3. Once you have done the above, try accessing phpmyadmin via: <baseurl>/phpmyadmin, and wala!
    • Phpmyadmin is accessible phpmyadmin is accessbile from the browser
    • Verify that we are able to log into the database and view all the database and tables Successfully logged into the database via phpmyadmin

Conclusion!

That’s actually all – amazingly simple, if you know the steps.

Now, we have a working wordpress installation on our Linode (Ubuntu) Server. It’s using the LAMP stack.

We also have access to the database via phpmy admin.

The site is also accessible via the internet!

Now that the server configuration is completed, the next step would be to restore you site, or implement your wordpress website.

As I am planning to restore my site, I’ll step down those steps in a separate article.

Stay tuned for more!!

2024 Shafik Walakaka. Please submit feedback and comments here!