Downloading and Installing WordPress on Windows

[Go back to the parent post: Installing WordPress Locally on a Windows Desktop or Laptop]

Unlike proprietary blogging tools and services, WordPress is open source software that you can download to your computer, modify if you wish and freely distribute.

Note: you will need to install XAMPP on a Windows computer (or one of its equivalents on an OS X or Linux computer) to install a local version of WordPress. See the tutorial: Downloading and Installing XAMPP for Windows

To download and install WordPress on a Windows computer:

(1) Go to wordpress.org.


















(2) On the homepage, left click on the "Download WordPress . . ." button.















(3) After the download has finished, navigate to where you saved the file on your computer. Note that the file is in ZIP format and needs to be "unzipped" (uncompressed).




















(4) I use free software called "ZipCentral" to extract my ZIP files. To unzip the file, I right click on the file name and left click on "Extract Here" in the menu that appears. This will place the extracted data in the same folder as the original ZIP file.




















(5) Green bars will show the progress of the extraction.





















(6) A folder containing the extracted data, with the same name as the original ZIP file, will appear in the folder.





















(7) Navigate to the hpdocs folder in the location you installed XAMPP on your computer (See the post: Complete Local WordPress Installation on Windows) . . .




















(8) and copy the entire unzipped folder containing WordPress into the hpdocs folder.