If you're looking to develop and test your WordPress website without affecting your live site, then you have the option to install WordPress locally. WordPress is a widely-used and versatile content management system that can be easily installed locally using a local development environment such as Local by Flywheel or XAMPP. By installing WordPress locally, you can crea te and customize your website according to your preferences, all without requiring an internet connection.
What Are The Benefits Of Installing WordPress Locally?
Installing WordPress locally has a number of advantages, including the ability to experiment with new themes, plugins, and customizations without the risk of damaging your live WordPress site. Furthermore, installing WordPress locally is a straightforward process that can be accomplished in just a few simple steps.
With a local installation of WordPress, you can develop and refine your website until it's ready to launch, confident that it's fully customized and ready to perform at its best.
Best Practices To Manage WordPress Website
After exploring the benefits of WordPress, if you have decided to build your business website with WordPress, there are some best practices that can help you manage your website and making it perform well. Following are the best practices to manage your WordPress website:
1. Keep WordPress Plugins Update
One of the main aspects of managing a WordPress site is consistently updating WordPress plugins to keep up with the ever-updating WordPress. WordPerss keeps updating to add new funcionalities. Accordingly, plugins and themes also update themselves to keep up with newer WordPress versions. So as a WordPress site owner, keep updating your plugins as soon as they give an alert for a new version.
2. Use Strong Login Credentials
To keep your WordPress site secure, you need to have a strong and unique password and username for your site. Yes WordPress has its built-in security feature, yet it is not completely safe from hackers.
Once you publish your site live, it will be attacked by bots. So to avoid that, you need to have unique and strong credentials for your WordPress website.
3. Install WordPress Security Plugins
Talking about the WordPress security, only having strong credentials is not enough. Next step in this regard is to install WordPress security plugins on your site. There are multiple security plugins that protect you from malware, hacking attempts and other cybersecurity threats.
4. Take Regular Backups Of Your Website
You never know what’s coming your way, either good or bad. Same goes for your website as well. We can’t predict what can go wrong. So, to be on the safer side, make a habbit of regularly taking your website’s backups.
There are a lot of WordPress backup plugins that can easily create a backup of your WordPress site. Additionally, depending on the plan you’ve purchased, a good WordPress hosting can also offer you automatic backup service. If your website is on localhost, you can simply zip your website folder and copy it to other location as well for backup purposes.
5. Install Caching Plugins
We have previously talked about the importance of peformance of WordPress website. Users bounce off your website if it doesn’t open in less than 3 seconds. For this purpose, WordPress comes with multiple caching plugin.
Caching plugins can speed up your WordPress site by caching the most frequently accessed conetnt and serving it to users quickly.
Install WordPress On Your Computer
اب ہم اس طرف جا رہے ہیں جس کے لیے ہم سب یہاں موجود ہیں، یعنی Install WordPress Locally۔ آپ کے کمپیوٹر پر ورڈپریس انسٹال کرنے کے لیے درج ذیل اقدامات شامل ہیں۔ یہاں اس مثال میں، میں Xampp سرور استعمال کروں گا، آپ اپنی پسند میں سے کسی ایک کا انتخاب کر سکتے ہیں۔
Note: I am assuming that you've already downloaded and installed the Xampp server, that's why I'm not talking abou the downloading process. If you have not downloaded it, then Download Xampp Server from here and install it.
1. Download WordPress
Here, firstly, you will need to download WordPress files. WordPress is free and open source. So to download WordPress, go to this https://wordpress.org link.
2. Create Your Directory
After you have downloaded Wordpress, go ahead and create your directory where you’re going to keep your WordPress website locally.
Generally, we keep our xampp folder in C drive in our PC. So following is the hierarchy for creating your website folder.
Go to Loacl Disk:C > Xampp > htdocs > your_directory
3. Place The WordPress Files To Your Folder
Move to htdocs folder and paste your WordPress files there. The downloaded WordPress file will be in zip format. You can extract the files in your new folder or extract them first and then paste them in your website folder.
So finally, afte creating directory and pasting the extracted WordPress files in it, this is how my new directory named mysite looks like.
4. Crearte Your Database
After getting your folder ready, you will have to create your database. For this, start Xampp server, make sure that your Apache and MySQL services are running.
Now, go to your browser, and type localhost/phpmyadmin This will open up MySQL admin panel. There, click 'Databases' button, give your database name and click Create button in front.
This will create your database. You can give any name to your database, even the same name as your WordPress directory.
5. Start Process Of Install WordPress Locally
Now, you have created your folder and database, now is the time to run the installation. For this, go to your browser and type localhost/your_directory_name As in my case, my directory name is mysite, so I will write localhost/mysite.
1. Select Language
In the first step, you will be asked to select your language. Select your preferred language and click Continue.
2. Provide Database Information To Install WordPress Locally
In the next step, you will be asked to provide the information about your Database. Following information will be asked:
- Database Name
- Database Username
- Database Password
- Database Host
- Table Prefix
Now, click let’s go button and enter this information. You will have to fill a form to provide the above mentioned information.
Write the name of your database in the first field. In the next field, write your username. As we're installing WordPress on localhost, so we will write root in the username field. Similarly, as the database is on localhost, and only you're going to use it, so we can omitt password as well. But if you're on a live hosting, try setting a unique username and password. We will also leave the last to fields empty, because our database host is localhost and we will keep the table prefix as it is.
Then click Submit button.
3. Provide Website Information
In this step, you will be asked to provide information about your website which you’re installing WordPress. The following information will be asked.
- Site Title
- Admin Dashboard Usernam
- Dashboard Password
- Your Email
There’s a check box at the bottom Search engine visibility. Checking this would mean that you’re asking the search engines not to index this site. As you’re on localhost, so no need to do this. You can leave it.
Give name of your website, set a unique username and password. WordPress can auto-generate a complex password for you, but that can be hard to remember for you. It is better to save the password and username for later usage.
If you want to keep an easy password, then there will be a checkbox which if checked, would ask WordPress to allow using a weak password. On localhost, you can do this. But don’t set a weak password on live.
Finally, Now click Install WordPress button. This will install WordPress on your computer and you will be redirected to loging page where you can login to your website by giving username and password you have just set.
That’s it. You’ve installed WordPress on localhost. Now login to your site and customize it to meet your needs and leverage the features of most popular CMS in the world.
Final Words About Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress locally can be a great way to experiment with different themes and plugins, test updates and changes, and develop your website in a safe environment before launching it live. By following the step-by-step instructions outlined in this article, you can easily install WordPress locally on your computer and start building your website.
However, installing WordPress is just the beginning of your website journey. To ensure your website runs smoothly and securely, it's important to follow best practices for managing WordPress.
Keeping WordPress and plugins up to date, using strong login credentials, installing security plugins, backing up your site regularly, using a caching plugin, optimizing images, and using a reliable hosting provider are just a few of the best practices that can help you manage your WordPress site effectively.
Read More:
7 Best Tips To Improve WordPress Website Performance
