WordPress is one of the best platforms that help build professional websites for businesses. Installing WordPress locally on your computer will help you build high quality websites, themes, plugins… Using some tools like XAMPP will help you run WordPress locally on windows 10 and you can build your entire website locally, then export it using WP Migration plugin which will help you re-import your website on a hosting server.
Hosting a WordPress website online in the development phase may cost some money and some time to achieve. The solution is to install WordPress locally and build your website whenever you have time, and once you’re done you can purchase a hosting server and a domain name and put your website online.
In this article we will show you step by step how to setup a WordPress website locally on your computer using XAMPP. First of all let’s talk about what is XAMPP and how it works.
XAMPP is an open source web server that allows programmers and developer to write and test their code on a local webserver using Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. It was developed by Apache on September 2002. This amazing tool includes a lot of servers and databases such as MariaDB, Apache HTTP Server and interpreters for PHP and Perl.
XAMPP is actually not the only software that provides a control panel to manage webservers or database servers locally. There are many other software that does the same job as XAMPP. However, we choose XAMPP because of its flexibility and simplicity.
Now that you know what is XAMPP and how it works, let’s see how WordPress will work locally on your computer. A WordPress local website is a simple WordPress website installed locally using a local database and a local webserver (XAMPP). You have the ability to modify your website as much as you want in a safe way.
Once you are done building or modifying your website locally, you can export it and host it online or replace your existing website by the local one.
Downloading and installing XAMPP will be the first step on your way to install WordPress locally on your computer. This software as we explained previously in this article will help you run a webserver and MySQL server locally on your machine. You can download it from this link.
Once the .exe file is downloaded, run it to install XAMPP, then click Next to continue.
In the next step of XAMPP installation, the installation panel will ask you to choose the components you want to install with XAMPP. For our case we only need to select Apache, MYSQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin. So check them and click next
Now, you can select which folder you want to install XAMPP in. You can leave the default option and click next.
In this step, XAMPP installer is asking us to download Bitnami but we do not need that to install WordPress, so just uncheck the box and click Next.
Now click next to install XAMPP.
Once the installation done, feel free to click Finish.
The XAMPP software was successfully installed on your computer, so now open the XAMPP control panel and click on start button for both Apache and MySQL as shown bellow.
If there was no problem, you will see Apache and MySql’ background in the green color which means both servers are running and everything is good.
In order to test everything we have done till now, you should open your browser and go to http://localhost/dashboard . If you see a webpage like the following image, then you are good to move on to the next step. Otherwise, please go back and check if you missed any of the steps we described previously.
Now, you need to download WordPress from this link, and copy the installed folder and then paste it in the folder called htdocs which you can find in the XAMPP file location (C://xampp).
The htdocs folder is actually the holder of all PHP local projects, and since WordPress is a PHP platform we need to put the project folder in the htdocs folder.
PhpMyAdmin is simple dashboard that help manage MySql databases very easily. We can manage Databases, Tables, Views…
In order to build our website, we need a database and that is why we are using PhpMyAdmin. Go to this link to access the dashboard http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ , then click on New to create a new database.
Enter a name for your database and click create. You can put whatever the name you prefer.
Normally, if you arrived to this step then you have installed everything and you ran all the servers we need. You also prepared the database to hold the data of our website.
In order to install website go to http://localhost/FOLDERNAME. The FOLDERNAME is the name of the WordPress folder you put in the htdocs folder.
Choose the language of your WordPress website and click next. Now you need to provide some general information about the website.
Database Name : The name of database you created in PhpMyAdmin.
Username: “root”
Password : Just leave it blank
Once you are done and you have completed the installation process then click finish.
Congratulations! Your WordPress website is ready. Go ahead and start building cool websites.
Learning to install and work with WordPress locally on your computer will help you understand a lot of things and build cool themes and plugins. Since you are not aware about any cost of money in the domain name or the hosting, you can build as much as you want of WordPress websites on your computer without paying anything.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and Thank you.
