Last updated on February 26th, 2026 at 06:36 pm
One of the big reasons why WordPress is so successful is down to how easy it is to get a website set up and running. It can literally be minutes.
However, as your website grows, or you start to manage multiple WordPress-powered websites, you’ll soon find certain tasks within the WordPress admin area become tedious and time consuming.
Navigating between admin pages, waiting for pages to load, updating themes/plugins…it all builds up.
WordPress are aware of this and have provided a solution; step forward the WordPress Command Line Interface: WP-CLI.
In this article, I’ll cover how to install and configure WordPress, install themes, plugins and set up users using WP-CLI.
- What is WP-CLI
- Download WordPress with WP-CLI
- Install WordPress with WP-CLI
- Manage Themes and Plugins with the CLI
- Theme update commands in WordPress CLI
- WordPress CLI plugin commands
- Create users using the the WordPress CLI
- Get experimenting with WP-CLI
What is WP-CLI?
WordPress CLI is the command line interface for WordPress.
This will allow you to manage certain aspects of your WordPress website without having to log in to the wp-admin area. You’ll be able to install and update plugins and themes, update WordPress core version and much more.
WP-CLI is readily available with your WebHostsOnline hosting and can be accessed through SSH.
Essentially, whatever task you need to do in wp-admin, there is usually an equivalent with WP-CLI.
As you’ll be able to complete the task with much less navigation and not wait for a page in wp-admin to load, using WP-CLI for those tasks will be much quicker.
If you’re already familiar with SSH and the command line, WP-CLI won’t be daunting to use and will be a great addition to your developer tools.
If you’re a beginner or not familiar with command line, this article will be a good starting point for you.
Download WordPress with WP-CLI
Downloading WordPress using WP-CLI will mainly apply to your website if it is hosted on our Shared Linux Hosting platform. Websites hosted on our optimised WordPress hosting platform will already provision with WordPress files pre-installed.
If this is your first-time using command line and WP-CLI and you’re just looking to play around and experiment, I recommend to create a new non-live hosting package or a directory which will not affect your live website.
First, you will need to access your website via SSH. We have a support guide on how to connect your website using SSH.
If you’ve successfully configured SSH and connected to your website, you will be placed in the root of the website. You can check the current directory by running this:
pwd
This will output the path to your current directory in the following format:
/Path/to/your/current/directory
If you want to create a directory to download WordPress in to, you can use the ‘mkdir’ command to create the directory. The following example will create ‘wordpress’ directory.
mkdir wordpress
You can then navigate to the directory using the ‘cd’ command. Here is an example:
cd wordpress
You can check the directory by running pwd as before this will output the path to the directory, i.e:
Path/to/directory/wordpress
Now that you’re in the directory you want to install WordPress in to, you can now download WordPress using WP-CLI.
Every WP-CLI command will start with ‘wp’ and then a following command. The following command will download WordPress in your current directory:
wp core download
WordPress core download
Install WordPress with WP-CLI
Once WordPress has downloaded, you’ll be able to continue with the installation process using WP-CLI.
Please note, if you haven’t created a database, you will need to do so. Then, you’ll need to create or update your wp-config.php file to connect to the database.
You can create a database via MyWebHostsOnline hosting control panel > ‘MySQL Databases’. You can find detailed instructions here: Create a MySQL database.
