Not everything needs to be done and tested on your live website. A simple mistake on your live website could make a mess. Situations can even become worse and ultimately, it harms those loyal website visitors. Therefore a good idea to test various themes and plugins is to install WordPress locally on your Windows. After installing WordPress locally, you’re free to experiment anything and this won’t affect your live website.
To install WordPress, many people use XAMPP or WAMP server. But the minus point of using these applications is that configuring and installing is not that simple, in fact it confuses beginner users. Not everybody out there has the knowledge to tinker around in database and edit wp-config.php file. We can say that the process is too complex with XAMPP and WAMP server.
Here comes a simple and easy to use windows application – Instant WordPress. With this application you can easily install WordPress as if you’re installing a program in windows. All you have to do is to just install this application as you would normally do for installing any windows application.
This is portable and free application. Now you can easily turn your windows PC in to a WordPress development environment. After installing this application, you can copy and paste the entire folder to your USB drive, thus you can always carry your WordPress development with you.
After installing Instant WordPress, start the application by double clicking on instantwp.exe file. You’ll be able to see the loading bar.
Wait for sometime to finish the loading process. Now you’ll be able to see this start-up screen.
That’s it. Now you have successfully installed WordPress and its time to try this out. Notice the “Local WordPress URL” field. Copy this URL and paste it in your browser.
You’ll be able to see WordPress home page (front-end) at this path. Check out the backend by using admin as username and password as password.
You can also easily access the plugins and themes folder directly from this app interface. Click on “plugins folder” or “themes folder” to open the respective folder.
Instant WordPress comes integrated with Apache web server, PHP and MySQL. These services are started when the application starts and stopped when application exits. Instant WordPress comes with:
- WordPress 3.2
- Apache 2.2.15 (Win32)
- MySQL 5.1.46-community-nt
- PHP 5.3.2
One more great feature of this software is that it comes integrated with dummy content, this makes it easy to start testing without adding any new posts or pages.
Instant WordPress is the easiest and quickest way to install WordPress on your Windows based PC. Download this program from below link.