How To Create Local WordPress Site Using XAMPP?

If you are a professional blogger, then you must have the local setup of your live WordPress blog if not, then you will learn here how to make it.

But, why do you need the local setup of a live WordPress site?

Suppose, you want to customize your WordPress blog then how would you do it? Directly change it on the live site? Or using the WordPress editor? No, it’s not the right way to customize the blog.

But why…?

You can not do it on the live site directly. Small mistakes will take down your blog, and readers won’t be able to open it instead if you have a local setup of WordPress blog then you can quickly test the changes in local and once you verified all the changes then you can move your site to production.

For this, you must have the local setup of your blog. Now, what is the requirement for making the local WordPress setup? A local server, MySQL, and PHP

There are different software available in the market for all the above purposes. Instead of installing three different software, I would recommend XAMPP, all in one software that will fulfill all your requirements. This is available freely, and you can download it from the official site.

Let’s start to learn how to set up a local WordPress site using the XAMPP within 15 minutes.

Download & install the XAMPP

First, you need to download the XAMPP server from the official site- Download here

Select the proper platform where you are downloading either Windows or Linux.

Once downloading is over, install it (I have not written the installation procedure for this as it is straightforward, but still if you want I will comment on this post).

Download WordPress

Next, you need to download the WordPress latest version from the official site.

You can download it here- Download WordPress latest version

Once you downloaded the WordPress, extract the zip, it contains the WordPress folder.

Now, you need to paste the WordPress folder to the XAMPP directory given below

For Windows, it is C:\Xampp\htdocs

For Linux, it is /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs

Once you paste it in the Xampp folder, rename it to your blog name so that you would remember it and differentiate it correctly. Here I have renamed it as dev_scrollbucks

Now, it’s time to start your local server. Open the XAMPP and launch the Apache and MySQL

Install WordPress

Once you began with the local server and Apache, it’s time to start your site. Open any browser and type

localhost/dev_scrollbucks/

My WordPress folder name was dev_scrollbucks, you can write your folder name to begin the installation of the WordPress.

You will see the installation screen of WordPress. Select the English language and click continue.

Before proceeding, you need to create the database for your local WordPress site. This screen itself asks for database information like database name, password, and host.

Create a database

Let’s create the database for your local site.

Open in browser localhost/phpmyadmin/ this will open the PHPMyAdmin dashboard.

Click on the Database and create the database for your site (here I have created the qa_scrollbucks database for my local scrollbucks site).

Now, moving back to where we left, click Let’s go and the installation of the WordPress beginning.

On the next screen, you will need to fill in the database information which you have created in the previous step.

Keep the database password blank and the host as localhost(refer below snapshot).

Click the submit, and you will ask to run the installation process of the WordPress.

Now, you will need to fill in the site information like username and password to login to the WordPress dashboard, site name, etc. Once all is done click on the install WordPress.

It will take a few minutes to install the WordPress, and you will get the success message.

Now, you can log in to your local WordPress site by going to /localhost/qa_scrollbucks/wp-admin/

Login with the credentials and enjoy your local WordPress site.

The next step is to install the themes which you like. You will get lots of themes from the WordPress theme directory or any third-party themes. If you want to install any WordPress plugins, you can do it. Here is my WordPress plugin directory.

If your site is live, you can import all the data from your website to the local site by using any migrator plugin.

Or export[Go to Tools>Export] all content of your site and import[Go to Tools>Import] it into a local WordPress site.

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