Learning how to install WordPress on Google Cloud is a bit more involved than with other web hosts. However, it’s not as intimidating as it might seem. Let’s jump right in!
Deploy a WordPress instance
Before anything else, you’ll need to sign up for Google Cloud. Setting up your account should only take a few minutes. Once you have access to your console, we recommend you verify the account using your bank or credit card.
Google Cloud offers a free trial for its services and just by verifying your account, they will give you $300 worth of credits to use for your projects:
Whether you decide to sign up for a free trial or not, the rest of the process works much the same. First off, you should launch a new project by going to your dashboard and accessing the menu to the left, then selecting the Marketplace option:
On the next page, use the search feature to look for WordPress, which will give you a list of ready-to-go WordPress configs you can deploy with a few clicks.
Scroll down until you find the WordPress option with Google Click to Deploy as its subtitle:
Once you select this, you’ll get an overview of estimated costs and what stack the package uses:
With this stack, you get 1 CPU and 2 GB of RAM, with an estimated cost of approximately $13.61 per month (you get discounts for each month of full usage). This also includes 10 GB of storage, and it’s enough to run a website that gets a moderate amount of traffic without any difficulties.
When you’re ready, click on LAUNCH ON COMPUTE ENGINE, then proceed to configure your setup.
Create and configure your new project
Next up, Google Cloud will ask you to select a name for your new project:
Once you hit the Create button, give the service a few minutes to get everything set up.
While you’re waiting, you get the chance to tweak the configuration for your new Google Cloud instance.
In the last section, you saw some cost estimates. Now, you get the chance to change every setting, which can increase or reduce costs.
As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to use less than 2 GB of RAM for your cloud instance. Also, the default configuration for this setup uses a shared CPU. If you’re concerned about performance, we recommend setting the Machine type to 1vCPU, which includes 3.75 GB of memory.
With this setup, you increase your monthly costs to $24.75 before discounts. We also suggest you change the Boot disk type from Standard Persistent Disk to SSD Persistent Disk, for increased performance:
The default 10 GB of storage should be enough for most websites. With this setup, your estimate should rise to about $25.97 per month.
Before you proceed, make sure to:
- Choose a region for your server.
- Tick the Install phpMyAdmin option.
- Enable both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
Now hit the Deploy button and wait for Google Cloud to do its thing, which can take a few minutes. Once everything’s ready, you can check out your new installation credentials from the deployment page:
Note: This section includes your MySQL and WordPress admin users and passwords – you’ll want to change those as soon as possible.
At this point, you’re almost there. You just need to do a few more things before your website is ready for the public.
Map a domain and set up an SSL certificate
Your website is up and running on the cloud now, but there are a couple of things you need to go over before calling it a day. Right now, your site is only accessible via an IP address, so you’ll want to map a custom domain to it as soon as possible.
If you don’t have a domain yet, you can purchase it from any domain registrar – here are some tips for picking a good one.
Next up, you need to set up an SSL certificate for your website, given that you enabled HTTPS traffic for it. This step isn’t strictly necessary, but we feel very strongly about encouraging HTTPS use, as does Google.
After you take care of these tasks, keep an eye on your billing costs, to make sure your free credits haven’t run out. Once they do, Google Cloud will start charging your chosen payment method at the end of each month.
