How to Build A WordPress Website Locally – What You Need To Know

WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, making it by far the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. Whether you‘re a seasoned developer looking to test new features or a beginner building your first website, creating a local WordPress development environment is an essential skill.

Developing locally allows you to build and test a WordPress site on your own computer before deploying it live on the web. This practice offers many benefits:

• Speeds up development by eliminating time spent waiting for files to upload to a remote server
• Reduces risk by providing a safe environment to test changes without affecting a live site
• Saves money on web hosting while a site is in development
• Makes it easy to debug code and fix issues that might not be apparent on a live server

In fact, a 2020 survey by WordPress agency Kinsta found that 69% of developers prefer to build WordPress sites locally before moving them to a staging or production environment.

Source: Kinsta WordPress Developer Survey 2020

Why WordPress Development Is In Demand

The widespread adoption of WordPress presents a huge opportunity for web developers. According to W3Techs, WordPress now accounts for over 60% of the CMS market. Compare that to the next closest competitors like Shopify (5.4%) and Joomla (4.6%):

CMS	Market Share
WordPress	64.1%
Shopify	5.4%
Joomla	4.6%
Drupal	3.3%
Wix	1.7%

Data from W3Techs as of May 2021

WordPress‘s dominance means more businesses are seeking developers with WordPress skills. The number of WordPress job listings on freelance platform Upwork grew 30% in 2020 compared to the previous year.

If you‘re a full-stack developer, adding WordPress to your toolkit can open up a wide range of projects, from creating custom themes and plugins to optimizing WordPress sites for performance and security.

Choosing a Local Development Environment

To run WordPress locally, you‘ll need a development environment that can execute PHP code and manage a MySQL database. The most common setup is a so-called "LAMP" stack with the following components:

• Linux operating system
• Apache web server
• MySQL database
• PHP scripting language

For most developers, the quickest way to set up a local LAMP stack is to use a pre-configured development tool rather than installing each component separately. Here‘s a comparison of some of the most popular WordPress development tools:

Tool	Operating System	Server	Database	Price
Local by Flywheel	Windows, Mac	Nginx	MySQL	Free
XAMPP	Windows, Mac, Linux	Apache	MariaDB	Free
MAMP	Windows, Mac	Apache or Nginx	MySQL	Free/$59
DesktopServer	Windows, Mac	Apache	MariaDB	$99.95

Each of these tools provides a graphical control panel to manage your local WordPress sites. They also offer features like one-click site creation, SSL support, and database management tools.

For this tutorial, we‘ll use XAMPP since it‘s free, open source, and available on all major operating systems. However, the basic process of creating a local WordPress site will be similar regardless of your chosen tool.

Installing XAMPP and WordPress

Here are the steps to install WordPress locally on Windows using XAMPP (you can find more detailed instructions in the XAMPP documentation):

1. Download the latest version of XAMPP for Windows from the Apache Friends website.
2. Run the installer, selecting the default components.
3. Open the XAMPP control panel and start the Apache and MySQL services.
4. Open your web browser and go to http://localhost to verify your server is running.
5. Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org.
6. Extract the WordPress ZIP file to the htdocs directory in your XAMPP installation (e.g. C:\xampp\htdocs).
7. Open phpMyAdmin by going to http://localhost/phpmyadmin in your browser.
8. Create a new database for your WordPress installation (e.g. wordpress).
9. Open http://localhost/wordpress in your browser to access the WordPress installer.
10. Enter your database details and run the installation process.

That‘s it! You should now be able to access your local WordPress site at http://localhost/wordpress.

Configuring Your Local WordPress Site

The WordPress configuration file wp-config.php contains important settings for your site, including database connection details. When you install WordPress locally, this file is created automatically based on the information you provide.

However, there are a few additional settings you may want to change in wp-config.php for your local development environment. Here‘s an example of what your file might look like:

<?php
define( ‘DB_NAME‘, ‘wordpress‘ );
define( ‘DB_USER‘, ‘root‘ );
define( ‘DB_PASSWORD‘, ‘‘ );
define( ‘DB_HOST‘, ‘localhost‘ );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG‘, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG‘, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY‘, false );

A few things to note:

• DB_USER is set to root since that‘s the default MySQL user in XAMPP, and DB_PASSWORD is left blank.
• WP_DEBUG enables WordPress debugging mode to display warning and error messages. This should always be on in your development environment.
• WP_DEBUG_LOG saves errors to a debug.log file in the wp-content directory for easy reference.
• WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY is set to false to hide error details from non-authenticated users.

Other useful configuration constants are WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to change your site‘s URL, and WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE to specify a development or staging environment.

Integrating With Git Version Control

Most professional WordPress developers use a version control system like Git to track changes to theme and plugin files. Combining Git with a local development workflow makes it easy to edit code locally, commit changes, and push updates to a remote repository.

To get started, initialize a new Git repository in your WordPress project directory:

cd C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress 
git init

Then use git add and git commit commands to track your changes:

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

You can also create a .gitignore file to exclude generated files and sensitive data from version control:

# Exclude WordPress core
/wp-admin/
/wp-includes/
/index.php
/wp-*.php
/xmlrpc.php

# Exclude uploads and cache
/wp-content/uploads/
/wp-content/cache/

# Exclude config files
wp-config.php

Once your local repository is set up, you can add a remote on a service like GitHub or Bitbucket to share code with your team and deploy to staging or production servers.

Debugging and Performance Testing

Developing locally makes it much easier to debug WordPress code compared to a live site. With XAMPP, you can view PHP errors and warnings directly in your browser window or in the debug.log file.

For more advanced debugging, you can use a tool like Xdebug to set breakpoints and inspect variables as your code executes. The free Xdebug extension integrates with IDEs like PhpStorm and VS Code.

It‘s also a good idea to test your site‘s front-end performance using browser developer tools. Lighthouse is a popular automated tool for auditing web pages and generating suggestions to improve metrics like page load speed:

Some key metrics to focus on are:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time it takes to receive the first byte of a response from the server. A good TTFB is under 200ms.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP): The point at which the browser renders the first bit of content from the DOM, like text or images. Aim for an FCP of 1.8 seconds or less.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time it takes to load the largest block of content in the viewport. An ideal LCP is 2.5 seconds or faster.

Running Lighthouse on your local WordPress site will help identify performance bottlenecks and areas for improvement before deploying to production.

Moving From Local to Live

Once you‘ve built and tested your WordPress site locally, the final step is to migrate it to a live web server. The basic process involves three steps:

1. Export your WordPress database using phpMyAdmin or the command line.
2. Copy your WordPress files to your web host via FTP or SSH.
3. Import the database and update your live wp-config.php file with the new database details.

Many WordPress hosting providers like WP Engine and Flywheel offer tools to simplify this process. For example, the Local by Flywheel app allows you to push your local site to a live Flywheel server with a single click.

If you‘re managing your own server, you can also automate deployments with a CI/CD pipeline using a service like Jenkins or Travis CI. A typical workflow might look like:

1. Push code changes to Git repository
2. CI/CD service automatically builds and tests the code
3. If tests pass, code is deployed to staging or production server

Automating your WordPress deployments can save a lot of time and reduce the risk of errors when moving from development to production.

Conclusion

Setting up a local WordPress development environment is an essential part of a professional WordPress workflow. Local development offers several key benefits:

• Faster development by eliminating server upload/download times
• Ability to test code changes without affecting a live site
• Easier debugging with tools like Xdebug
• Improved performance profiling using Lighthouse and other tools

Using a pre-configured local server package like XAMPP, you can create a WordPress development environment with just a few clicks. From there, you can use tools like Git and Lighthouse to optimize your workflow and improve your site‘s code quality and performance.

By adopting a local development process and following WordPress coding best practices, you‘ll be able to deliver higher quality sites to your clients and users. So if you‘re not already developing WordPress sites locally, now is the perfect time to start!