Nowadays, it is very important to have an awesome website speed to offer a good user experience to visitors of your website, as well as to improve Google search rankings.

In order for your website to load fast, you need a nicely coded website and a super server (Web Hosting) response time to serve the website files.

We can help you develop a clean-coded website but with that, you also need awesome web hosting that loads all the website files faster. Doubtlessly, AWS is an excellent option for cloud hosting, but the installation of the server, cPanel configuration, and website installation is a little technical and costly. However, today, I will show you how to easily install your WordPress website on AWS WITHOUT any technical knowledge.

Let me explain how.

First open aws.amazon.com in your web browser and sign up/sign in with your credentials. You also get 3 months AWS credit to taste the performance.

After Login, the first thing you should do is to create an instance. Let’s do it step by step:

1. Search for “Lightsail” in the top search bar, and that will take you to the Amazon Lightsail landing page.
2. Choose the right server location according to your target market. For example, if your target audience is from Canada, you should select the Canadian server location.
3. Then, next is to select a platform. Let’s stick with the Linux platform.
4. In the next step, select a blueprint, and keep Apps + OS.
5. And below that, keep WordPress selected. It will show WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic.
6. Then, select your instance plan. You have lots of options to choose from. If you want to try free for 3 months, the free plan is eligible up to the $10/month plan.
7. Now, we should name an instance that is easy to remember & identity in future.
8. The last step is to click the Create Instance button.

Note: As far as connecting to your server is concerned, we can do that with SSH keys or go to the instance and click the “connect using SSH” button.

On the next page, you’ll see that instance with a pending status. Wait until the status turns to running.

Now, it’s good to go.

You can copy and paste the IP Address (shown with an arrow in the above image) into your browser, and it will show a default WordPress blog installed on it.

To log in to the backend of your WordPress website, you have to go to IPaddress/wp-login.php and enter the username and password. By default, the username is “user,” and for the password, go to your instance and click on the “connect using SSH” button. It’ll connect your instance in a pop-up. Write the command “cat bitnami_application_password” to get the password.

Now, we have to point our domain to the IP address associated with our installed Lightsail instance. For that, you have to go to the website from wherever you bought your domain name.

1. Log in with your credentials.
2. Find the DNS settings.
3. Change “A” records to point it back to this IP Address.

Note: It will take some time to propagate, from a couple of minutes up to a couple of hours.

To check propagation, use a website like dnschecker.org, and you can check “A” record for your domain name.

Once propagation is completed, you can browse your website using the domain name in a web browser.

Now, let’s set up an SSL certificate for your website. We can do that by typing commands.

1. Go to your instance and click on the “Connect using SSH” button.
2. Now, type “sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool” and press enter to install SSL.
3. Type in your domain name with and without “www” (keep one space between them) and press enter.
4. If you’d like to enable HTTP to HTTPS redirection, press “Y” and hit enter.
5. Now, it will ask if you want to enable non-www to www direction. If you only want to use the “www” version, type “Y” and press enter.
6. In the last step, it will ask if you agree to these changes. Review them, and if they all look fine, just press “Y” and enter.
7. Then, type in your email address and press enter.
8. Agree to the terms and conditions, and it will show a confirmation message. The Bitnami HTTPS configuration tool has succeeded in modifying your installation. Press enter to continue.

Now, let’s go ahead and check your website URL in a browser to test the SSL certificate installation. Your website should now show “https” with a lock icon. The certificate will be valid for 3 months from now, but it will update on a monthly basis and never expire.

Now, you can make edits to your WordPress website or import your website from the old server to here without accessing File Manager and PHPMyAdmin, using a plugin like UpDraft. This is one of the best free WordPress backup plugin which can not only import and export entire website but also takes regular automatic backups.

To explain the import and export of your existing WordPress website in detail, we’ll write another post shortly and link it here.