By Neil on January 10, 2014
How to set up WordPress on a local development environment in 5 minutes
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Neil, I have recently set up word press through my hosting provider. Unfortunately, I came across you website AFTER this, and, consequently, this handy You Tube tutorial. Is it possible to still download word press locally along with XAMPP and run this normally following your steps or do I need to delete my host installation and do this instead. Whatever the case, a brief explanation would be helpful. I hope this all makes sense but please let me know. Warm regards, John
Hi John, I replied to this on YouTube, but I’ll paste the same reply here too.
You can still set up WordPress locally like in this video, and develop your website. This doesn’t affect the WordPress install with your hosting provider. They are two completely separate entities.
You can then work on your website locally and when you are ready to go live with it you can transfer it over to your hosted website. Transferring across is a little tricky, and you will need to export your database over and also alter some links, but this is exactly what I did with this website: http://ski-instructor-courses.com/. I had an older version of this site but wanted to make a lot of changes. I developed a new site locally while leaving the old site live, and then copied it all across when I was happy.
I don’t have a guide about transferring a website from a locally hosted computer to a live hosting provider, but there are plenty out there if you search Google etc.
If you are making a brand new website and have no issues with connection speed/data usage it may be easier to work on your site on your hosting provider install, and avoid any transfer issues. You can always put an ‘Under Construction’ or ‘Coming Soon’ page up. There are WordPress plugins that can do this for you while you work in the background.
Hope this helps, and if not just let me know.
Cheers, Neil.