Installing WordPress on Hostinger takes a few clicks from inside hPanel, but the exact path branches partway through, and I went through both options on a live account so I could show you where they lead. I clicked into a real hosting plan, added a new WordPress site, and followed the flow all the way to a finished, live homepage.
Before You Start, You Need a Hosting Plan
This guide assumes you already have an active Hostinger hosting plan. If you have not signed up yet, our Hostinger review walks through the registration process along with the different hosting types and plan tiers Hostinger offers, so you can pick the right one before installing anything.
Step 1: Open the Websites Section in hPanel
Log into hPanel and click Websites in the left sidebar. This takes you to a list of every hosting plan on your account, grouped by plan name, with each site you already have running listed underneath.
Every plan on the account has its own Add website button.
If you have more than one plan, make sure you click the button next to the plan you actually want the new WordPress install to live on, since that determines the resources and storage available to the site.
Step 2: Choose WordPress From the Add Website Menu
Clicking Add website opens a dropdown with four options:
- AI Builder, for describing a site to AI and building it as a non-WordPress site or app
- WordPress, the option covered in this guide
- Custom PHP/HTML website, for uploading your own code or a different application
- Deploy Web App, for deploying from GitHub or an uploaded file
Select WordPress.
Step 3: Pick a Domain or Use a Temporary One
Hostinger asks what domain or subdomain the site should use. Start typing and any matching domain already on your account appears as a suggestion.
If you do not have a domain ready yet and just want to try WordPress first, click Use temporary domain instead.
I used a temporary domain for this walkthrough. Hostinger generates a random address such as maroon-octopus-214822.hostingersite.com and explains it as a placeholder you can use while building, before connecting a real domain later.
Click Next once your domain choice is confirmed.
Step 4: Set Your WordPress Admin Details
This screen sets up the account you will use to log into WordPress later:
- WordPress admin language, the language for your WordPress dashboard
- WordPress admin mail, the email tied to the admin account
- Administrator password, with live requirements shown as you type (one number, one symbol, one uppercase and lowercase letter, 8 to 50 characters, Latin letters only)
Below the form sit two very different paths forward, and this is the decision that shapes everything else in this guide:
- Build from scratch installs plain WordPress and takes you straight into it, ready to build manually with whatever theme or page builder you choose
- Create website with AI installs WordPress the same way, then hands the whole build to an AI assistant that generates pages, copy, and design based on a prompt you give it
I chose Create website with AI for this test, mainly because I wanted to see how far Hostinger has actually taken this. It’s not something every host bundles directly into a standard WordPress install screen, and I wanted a real answer on whether it holds up.
Step 5: WordPress Installs in the Background
Whichever path you picked, Hostinger installs WordPress core first. A progress screen shows the percentage climbing, and Hostinger even drops a small dinosaur-jump game on the loading screen to pass the time.
On my test, the core install finished in under a minute.
What Happens Next Depends on the Path You Chose
If You Chose Build From Scratch
This path skips the AI prompt screens entirely and drops you straight into a blank WordPress installation, ready for you to pick a theme, install plugins, and build the site page by page yourself.
If you already know WordPress and just want the fastest route to a clean install, this is the button to click back on Step 4.
If You Chose Create Website With AI
Once the core install finishes, you land on a prompt screen instead of an empty dashboard. Hostinger gives you a text box to describe the site you want, along with a handful of example prompts (a wine tasting page, a fitness coaching business, a candle shop) if you want a starting point.
There is also an Enhance with AI button that expands a short prompt into a more detailed one before you submit it.
How specific you are here matters. A vague prompt gives the AI little to work with, while a prompt naming your brand, your audience, your tone, and the pages you need gives it something close to a real brief.
I used a detailed prompt describing a personal training studio called Forge Fitness, including its location, target audience, color direction, and the pages I wanted, and the output reflected that level of detail closely.
If you decide partway through that you would rather build manually after all, there is a Go to WordPress admin link at the bottom of this screen that drops you straight into the standard dashboard instead.
After submitting a prompt, an AI assistant chat panel takes over on the right side of the screen. It walks through a short setup conversation before building anything:
- Confirms the page editor it will use (Elementor, in my test)
- Confirms site language
- Confirms or suggests a brand name, offering a couple of AI-generated alternatives alongside the one from your prompt
Next, the assistant proposes a page list based on your prompt. Mine came back with Home, Services, Trainers, Schedule, and Contact. Each page name has an X to remove it, and there is a field to add new ones before clicking Confirm.
The assistant then asks two more optional questions, contact details (email, address, phone number) and social media links (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok). Both can be skipped with a single click if you would rather add them later inside WordPress itself.
Once you confirm, the assistant starts generating the actual site, with its own progress bar separate from the earlier WordPress install.
From submitting my prompt to seeing a finished homepage took just under two minutes. The result was a real Elementor-built page, not a placeholder, with a hero section, headline, subheading, and call-to-action button already matching the brand name and tone from my prompt.
At this point a customization panel opens on the right with three tabs:
- Colors, a set of preset palette pairs, or a custom option to pick your own
- Fonts, paired font combinations such as Montserrat with Manrope, or DMSans with Open Sans
- Logo, a drag-and-drop upload for your own logo file (PNG or JPG, up to 2MB)
I tested each tab and switching between palettes or fonts updates the live preview on the left immediately, before you commit to anything.
Once you are happy with the look, click Finish customization.
The assistant confirms the site is done and gives you two buttons, Customize again if you want to keep adjusting, or Setup in WP admin to move into the WordPress dashboard itself.
Finishing Setup in WordPress Admin
Clicking through to WP admin lands you on an Onboarding screen rather than the standard WordPress dashboard. It shows a six-step setup checklist:
- Create site with AI, already marked complete since you just finished that step
- Add a domain, to replace the temporary address with a real one
- Claim a free business email
- Enhance your website with plugins
- Get found on Google
- Turn site visitors into subscribers
Below the checklist sits a Learn WordPress section with a beginner’s guide video and a handful of shorter tutorials covering Gutenberg, Google Site Kit, importing images, and editing the footer, all pulled in directly from Hostinger Academy.
Click the Preview site at any point to see the live result of what the AI assistant built.
The finished site included a full homepage with a hero section, a services block, a testimonials section, and a footer with contact details, social icons, and a newsletter signup form, all generated from a single prompt and a short back-and-forth with the assistant.
Overall Verdict
Installing WordPress on Hostinger is a genuinely quick process either way you go. Pick Build from scratch and you have a bare WordPress install ready to customize in under a minute. Pick Create website with AI and you get a full, styled homepage with real copy and images in under two minutes, built from a single prompt rather than an empty page. The choice comes down to how much of the early build work you want handled for you, not how long either path takes.
From here, the onboarding checklist inside WP admin is the natural next stop, starting with swapping the temporary domain for a real one and claiming your business email before moving on to plugins and SEO.
Once that is done, you are working inside a standard WordPress dashboard, so everything I would normally tell you about managing a WordPress site from here on applies exactly as it would anywhere else.
