How to install WordPress on Windows

WordPress is probably the most popular CMS (content management system) for today. Using WordPress, you can deploy your site in minutes, running which you can create a personal blog, a set of information articles, one-page landing, an online store and much more.

This note will show you how to install WordPress on Windows.

WordPress on the local computer may be needed for testing, for creating a local copy of a site and for other aims.

What is necessary to start WordPress on Windows?

WordPress is a web application. It requires a web server. PHP and MySQL are also needed. All this you can configure according to the guide ‘How to install web server on Windows 10 (Apache 2.4, PHP 7, MySQL 5.7 and phpMyAdmin)’.

This instruction assumes that your web server is installed on the manual, the link to which is given above.

Where to download WordPress for Windows

WordPress is an engine that is written in PHP and which uses the MySQL DBMS. Therefore, for WordPress there is no difference in which operating system to run. Those, if you installed and configured a web server, it does not matter to you whether you are on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or any other operating system. Whether you are running 64- or 32-bit system does not matter too. Being a web application, WordPress does not interact with the OS directly; it works ‘inside’ the web server.

So, go to the official WordPress site and download the latest version from the download link:

As you can see, there are two links for downloading, but they differ only in the archive formats. Available formats:

• .zip
• .tar.gz

For Windows users, the ZIP archive is a little more convenient, since it can be unzipped by standard OS tools.

The direct download link is https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

How to run WordPress on Windows

Since WordPress uses MySQL in its work, first we need to create a database for our future site on WordPress. The easiest way to do this is using phpMyAdmin.

Open phpMyAdmin, go to the "Databases" tab, enter the name of the new database and in the next field select the encoding utf8mb4_unicode_ci:

As you can see, for the database I chose the name test_wordpress. When everything is ready, click the "Create" button.

Any further work with the database in manual mode is not required - we do not need to add tables or do anything else.

Unzip the downloaded archive with WordPress. The whole folder from the archive, which is called wordpress, move to the directory of the web server. For example, I move the folder to the root directory C:\Server\data\htdocs\. In this case, my future site will be available at http://localhost/wordpress/. Just open this address in your web browser. You will be prompted to select language, used while installation process and for your future web site:

The next window is informational, it is enough to press the button ‘Let’s go!’:

This window explains what information the installer will ask you in the next step.

In the next window we need to enter:

• Database name
• Database username
• Database password
• Database host
• Table prefix (if you want to run more than one WordPress in a single database)

The Database name is the same name that we recently entered in phpMyAdmin. In my case it is test_wordpress. The Database username is the database user (do not confuse with the WordPress user). If you installed a web server under an article that was previously referenced, then the user name is root. If you did not set a password for the root user, then the Database password is an empty string. On the local computer, enter localhost as the Database host. Do not change the value of Table prefix.

So, there should be something like:

When you are ready, click the "Submit" button.

In the next step, the WordPress installer will automatically check whether there is access to the database, whether the username and password are appropriate. If everything is normal, then the message will be displayed:

All right, sparky! You’ve made it through this part of the installation. WordPress can now communicate with your database. If you are ready, time now to…

In this case, you just need to click the "Run the install" button.

Problems can arise if:

• you forgot to create a database
• you entered the database name incorrectly
• you entered the username or password incorrectly
• you entered the server address incorrectly
• the specified user does not have permissions to the specified database
• web server stopped or stopped MySQL database server

On the next page we need to enter the Site Title, Username, Password and e-mail address:

All ends with the "Install WordPress" button.

Honored congratulations:

Click the "Log in" button and enter your credentials.

Your site is available at http://localhost/wordpress/ (the address may be different, depending on the directory where you copied the wordpress folder.