More than 60 million people chose WordPress worldwide. Why most of the people choosing WordPress? Because many free themes and plugins available for WordPress this will be minimize the development cost, also easy to installation without any technical knowledge. But you should not install any plugins or themes directly in your live hosting. Some plugin or theme may have security or compatibility issues. So the best practice is installing the plugin in your local test WordPress environment and test the plugin. If it is not make any issues you can install your live hosting.
Make WordPress Test environment
Basically WordPress developed by using PHP with MySQL. PHP run with apache server, so you must install the Apache server, PHP and MySQL for make test environment. In this situation many people install all this apps separately downloaded from various places. How can you install all this in one packages?
What is XAMPP?
XAMPP is one package of Apache server, PHP and MySQL. Using this package you can make your WordPress test environment simply. Also make your test environment for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux with free of cost.
You can install the WordPress in your local host by doing following steps:
- Download and install the XAMPP software in your computer
- Open XAMPP control panel and start Apache and MySQL
- Logon http://localhost in your browser, XAMPP window will be open.
- Go to phpMyAdmin page by click on the link under Tools.
- Create the database in phpMyAdmin page
- Open the XAMPP control panel and click on Explore button
- XAMPP installed folder will be open
- Go to htdocs folder here extract your WordPress source in folder (ie: wordpress)
- logon http://localhost/wordpress in your browser
Now WordPress installation setup window will be open. You can make a process as per WordPress installation instruction. After successful installation you can make a test for plugin and theme installation in your local environment.