Whether you are a WordPress site owner, designer, or developer, at some point, you are going to need a local WordPress environment for testing purposes. Having WordPress installed locally on your computer has some advantages.
The most significant reason is, having the ability to add new features to your website and test them before rolling them out live. Adding new features to a live site without testing them is a bad idea. If something goes wrong, it could negatively affect your readers.
In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to install WordPress on WAMP, which is for windows only. Since WAMP has a bit of a learning curve, we only recommend this for advanced users. Beginners should take a look at Local by Flywheel.
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What is WAMP?
WampServer, also known as WAMP, is a free tool you can use to install WordPress locally, specifically for Windows devices. WAMP is short for Windows, Apache web server, MySQL, and PHP. This tool will allow you to install WordPress on your computer for testing, design, and development purposes.
How to Install WordPress on WAMP
Now that you know what WAMP is, we will show you how to install WAMP on your windows computer, then how to install WordPress on WAMP. Just follow the instructions and you will have WordPress installed locally at the end.
Step 1. Download WAMP to Your Computer
For the first step, you will need to download a copy of the WAMP software onto your windows computer. We recommend using Google Chrome to do this, because, by default, the WampServer website is in French, and Chrome does a great job at translating.
To do this, go ahead and visit the WampServer website and click on START USING WAMPSERVER.
Doing so will take you to the downloads section of the site, where you will have two versions to choose from; WampServer 32-bit or WampServer 64-bit. You need to select the one that is recommended for your operating system.
If you are unsure whether you are running 32-bit or 64-bit, you can get this information by navigating to Settings > System > About. Then look for System type, located under Device specifications.
Next, click on the WampServer version you need and fill in the form. If you are using Chrome, right-click and choose Translate to English. Once you have filled in the form, click on the black and yellow button at the bottom.
Step 2. Install WAMP on Your Computer
After your download has finished, click on the wampserver.exe file to start the installation process. This may take a few minutes.
You will then be prompted by a series of instructions to complete the installation.
NOTE: Write down where you install WAMP, you will need this later for the WordPress installation.
Once you have successfully installed WAMP, go ahead and launch the application, if it’s not already running.
Step 3. Create a New Database for WordPress
In this step, we will need to create a blank MySQL Database for WordPress to use. After you have launched WAMP, there should be a green icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen indicating that WAMP is ready to use.
Click on the green WAMP icon followed by phpMyAdmin.
Doing so will open the phpMyAdmin login screen in your default browser.
In the Username field, type in root, leave the Password field empty, then click on the Log in button.
Next, click on Databases at the top. Under the Create Database section, give your new database a name, then click on the drop-down menu and select the Collation we are using (utf8mb4_unicode_ci) or select the one you prefer to use.
NOTE: Write down your Database name, you will need this later.
After that, click on the Create button to create your new database.
That’s it. You now have a local database setup. You can now log out of phpMyAdmin by clicking on the door with the green arrow icon; next to the house icon.
Step 4. Install WordPress
Once you have finished creating a local database, the next step is to install WordPress on WAMP.
To do this, visit WordPress.org and download a fresh copy of WordPress. Doing so will download a copy of WordPress in a .zip file to your computer.
Once the file has finished downloading, you will need to extract the contents. You can do this by right-clicking on the .zip file and selecting Extract All, selecting a Destination for the folder, and clicking on Extract.
When the extraction is complete, you will have a wordpress-version folder, something like wordpress-6.0.3.
Open the wordpress-version folder. You will see another folder inside named wordpress. That’s the folder you need. Make a copy by right-clicking and selecting copy.
Next, navigate to the directory you installed WAMP on, then paste the wordpress folder into the www folder.
In our case, we installed WAMP on the C: drive and have a 64-bit operating system. So we copied the wordpress folder into C:\wamp64\www.
After that, it is a good idea to rename the wordpress folder to something more meaningful. The name of the folder will be the URL for your local WordPress installation. We renamed ours to ‘testsite’.
Step 5. Visit Your Local WordPress Site
Now we are ready to install WordPress. Open your web browser and type into the URL/Search bar ‘http://localhost/foldername’ but replace ‘foldername’ with whatever you named your wordpress folder.
In our case, the URL will be http://localhost/testsite.
After that, you will be presented with a series of prompts to set up your WordPress installation.
First, you need to select your language and click on Continue. After that, you will see a prompt telling you that you will need your database information. When you are ready, click on Let’s go.
On the next screen, you will enter your database information.
- Database Name: This will be what you named your database.
- Username: This will be root.
- Password: This field should be empty.
- Database Host: This should say localhost.
- Table Prefix: This can stay as wp_ unless you want to be something different of course.
Below is an example of ours.
When you have finished entering your database information, click on Submit.
On the next screen, you will see a message saying, WordPress can now communicate with your database, click on the Run the installation button.
Then you can give your site a name and create a username and password. Once you are finished, click on the Install WordPress button.
NOTE: Make sure you write down your username and password, you’ll need them to log into your local site.
When the WordPress software has finished the installation process it will show a ‘Success!‘ message.
Finally, click on the Log In button. This will redirect you to the admin login page.
That’s it! You made it to the end. You now have a local WordPress site installed on your computer.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this step-by-step how to install WordPress on WAMP guide has helped you learn how to set up a local testing environment for your WordPress website, design, or development project.
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