So Plesk, as i wrote in my recent post it is a web panel that makes it (in my opinion) extremely easy to manage your websites and other web apps. Today i’m going to deploy a simple (and very empty) WordPress website on it.
I am going to do this from the admin user. Which i obviously DO NOT recommend, there may be some reasons to do this in a production environment but those are really rare. If you are taking this into production, you should of course always set up proper user profiles.
However i currently haven’t done this since i am not quite sure if i am keeping things running on Plesk as of yet. If i do end up permanently deploying it, i will of course setup proper profiles (even if it’s really just for me alone)
So first of all, what do you need to start?
To start, you need a domain name. Plesk does support using subdomains under that should you only have one domain name but it requires at least one. Aside from that, i am assuming you have followed the guide for setting up Plesk itself found at their website.
Let’s get started
After installing Plesk going logging in, you’ll be dumped on the screen below minus a couple options in the left menu-bar. There might be some other slight differences between this and what you seem, but that doesn’t matter since we will be pressing the same button here anyways.
We are going to start by clicking the “Add Domain” button
The following screen appears, you may again notice i have a couple more options. This is due to me having a couple extra extensions installed that you probably don’t. Don’t worry if this is the case, you probably won’t need these. If you do end up needing one of these, they can easily be installed from the extension store in
After Clicking the WordPress button, you’ll see the following screen, here we fill in our domain name (at the red arrow).
After doing so, you’ll notice Plesk has automatically generated a system user and password for this user. The username matches our domain name with a string of characters. For now i will leave this at what it is, but should you ever (for whatever reason) need a system user for your web app, just know that they do exist and can be found in the Websites & Domains section.
Next we click the Add Domain button at the bottom and we watch the magic happen.
It’ll run a few steps before everything is setup, but everything should get a green check mark after a little while.
Once this is done, the following screen appears. Here you can set a name, plugin or theme, language and WordPress version. Also be sure to check the username and email address. A thing to note here, this is not a system user, this is the user you’ll use to login to your WordPress administrator account.
Should you ever forget your WordPress password, this system also allows for an easy way to change this password. As long as you have the password for Plesk, you can change it.
For now, just click install, wait a few seconds and you’ll should be able to access your WordPress shortly
Congrats, its installed now. You could start using this, however i recommend following the next couple steps to set up SSL certificates using Let’s Encrypt.
SSL Using Let’s Encrypt
We start by going to the Dashboard tab on our website.
Next we click the SSL/TLS Certificates button
The following screen pops up, we click the Install button under the Let’s Encrypt option.
You may need to scroll down a bit for this to appear!
A form pops up asking for your email address and a couple other things, if you do not know what these mean fill it out the same way as i did. We could also check the Wildcard option, however this can cause some issues in some configurations.
Be sure to also check the Webmail option if you have that enabled for your domain.
After checking these, click the Get it free button at the bottom.
The following screen may pop up depending on how your Plesk instance is configured. I’m not going into what that means at this time as it is kinda complex, for now just click install
After doing so, you’ll see the screen below. Here i’m going to recommend at least turning on the “Keep websites secured” option for obvious reasons. Aside from that, OCSP Stapling could speed things up since it allows the web server to request the status of the certificate rather then the end user’s browser. HSTS can also be a good thing to turn on, it could however cause issues with some legacy systems. It is definitely recommended you do so though
So, does it work?
With that all done, the only thing left to do is to check if it actually works. So lets go to our domain and……
Success!!!
Congratulations, you have now successfully setup a WordPress website on Plesk and activated SSL on this website. Should you have any issues or questions, feel free to ask them below and i’ll try to get an answer to you as quickly as i can. The Plesk forum is of course also a great place for these questions.
