Installing WordPress locally is an excellent idea if you are starting your WordPress journey. In this article, I will give you a detailed guide on installing WordPress on your local computer. Follow the steps below to install WordPress on your local computer:
To set up WordPress locally, you need three things:
- MySQL: Database Management Software.
- PHP: Programming Language
- Apache: Web Server Software
It can be a very tedious task to install all of them one by one, especially for a beginner. That’s where Xampp comes into the picture. Xampp is a software package that mimics a complete environment that WordPress needs to function. Apart from this, you also need to download and install WordPress on your local computer. Let’s see how it’s done:
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Download the Xampp from the official website of Apache Friends. Open the installer and keep clicking next to install Xampp in default settings.
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The next thing that you need to install is WordPress. Click here to download WordPress.
Once you open wordpress.org, you will find a download WordPress button at the bottom of the page. Click it to start downloading WordPress, as shown below!
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Once the download is finished, a zip file will be downloaded. Extract the contents of the zip file, and a folder named “WordPress” will be created as shown in the animation below:
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Now, copy the WordPress folder and navigate to C://Xampp/
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Paste the WordPress folder inside C://xampp/htdocs, as shown below. The "htdocs" folder contains all the websites that xampp will run:
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Now, we need to start the Apache and MySQL module. Type “Xampp Control Panel” in the search bar of Windows 10 and open the Xampp application, as shown in the below animation.
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Click on the start buttons in front of Apache and MySQL modules. You should see the status turn green after you start them.
The next thing that we need to do is to set up a database for our WordPress website. So, open your web browser and head over to localhost/phpmyadmin
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Now, click on “Databases” and create a new database with the name "wordpress".
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Now head over to localhost/WordPress.
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Enter the name of the database in which you want WordPress to save your data. In our case, it is “wordpress” because we created a database named wordpress in PHPMyAdmin.
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Enter ‘root’ as the user name and leave the password blank. This is the default configuration of Xampp.
- WordPress requires you to fill in some details like name, email address, user name, and password for your WordPress site. Fill in all the details correctly, and then click on the “Install WordPress” button.
That's it! Congratulations on successfully installing WordPress on your local computer. I guarantee that if you’ve followed every step correctly, then you will get your WordPress installed within minutes. On logging in, you will see a beautiful but confusing dashboard for a beginner.
Don’t worry! I’ve got you covered. Click here to watch my WordPress tutorial free.