Installing WordPress locally on our computer is helpful in a number of ways especially during the initial stages of creating a WordPress site. The local installation provides us with an easily accessible environment to test the different themes, plugins and even code snippets before moving these to the actual production server. Although the local installation of WordPress is not a substitute for setting up a staging environment in live server, we can utilize this option to save a lot of time to fix issues related to themes and plugins.
Installing and running WordPress on our local computer is much easier than we think. This does not require any programming skills or knowledge about servers. We have already discussed how to install WordPress locally using Instant WordPress. If we face any issues with this installation method we have other options as well. In this blog, I will guide you through the step by step process to install WordPress locally on a windows pc using DesktopServer by ServerPress.
Step1: Go to the downloads section of ServerPress website and select the desktop server limited version. Fill in the required fields and click the Free Download button.
Step2: This will redirect us to the purchase confirmation page. At the bottom of this page, there is a download link as highlighted in the below screenshot. Click the link and download the file.
Step3: We will get a zip file after download. Extract the file using some tool like WinZip. The extracted folder would be like as shown in the below image.
Step4: Open the installation file highlighted in the above image. Now the installation setup will start.
Step5: Proceed with the installation by clicking the Continue button in the installer.
Step6: Continue the installation by selecting the New Desktop Server Installation radio button. The installation will now be complete and a confirmation message will appear. This message has the path of the system folder where the desktop server has been installed.
Step7: Now we can navigate to this path, right-click the desktop server icon and create a shortcut of this application on the desktop. This is for accessing the application easily from the desktop rather than going to the installation path and opening the application.
Step8: Now click the desktop server shortcut icon on the desktop and open the application. Give administrator permission to this application by selecting the option as shown below.
Step9: In the next page a screen as shown below will appear. Select the option to start Apache and MySql services.
Note: MySql is the database that stores all our WordPress data. Apache is the server on which our local WordPress installation is running. For those who do not have any idea what these are, no need to worry. The beauty of the Desktop server is that we do not require any technical knowledge to get our WordPress site up and running on our computer.
Step10: In the next screen select the option to create a new development site.
Step11: In this step just give our website the required name. In our case it is blogtriangle. By default, the latest WordPress zip file will be available at the blueprint section of this screen. If not, download the latest WordPress zip file and refer the path here. Site Root of this section simply indicates where in our local computer our website files will be stored. There is no need to change the default available option. Once these options are selected click the Create button at the bottom.
Step12: In this step, a confirmation message appears with a link. Click on this link. This will redirect us to the WordPress installation page.
Step13: Complete the WordPress installation by filling in the relevant details.
Step14: Now navigate to the site URL and we can see that our local WordPress site is up.
Step15: Now close all the installation setup and open again by clicking the desktop server icon in our desktop. We will see an option Sites at the bottom left corner of the page as highlighted below.
Click on this button and we will be redirected to a webpage having the links to our website, admin dashboard, and phpMyAdmin.
On clicking the Dashboard link we will be redirected to the admin dashboard of our local WordPress installation. We can log in to the admin dashboard by providing the username and password that we have set during the WordPress installation process.
Clicking the Database button on the screen will redirect us to phpMyAdmin screen. Here we can view our local WordPress database.
Thus in some simple steps that took less than 15 minutes, we have our local WordPress installation ready.
Note: There is also a premium version of Desktop server available that helps us to manage multiple WordPress installations on our local computer. Also, this version has a provision to directly deploy our local WordPress to live server. Such features are of great use to site admins managing multiple sites.
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