Written by Admin on 2025-05-06

How to Download a WordPress Site to XAMPP for Local Development

If you're a WordPress developer or designer, you may need to create a local development environment on your computer before deploying a site to a live server. One way to accomplish this is to use XAMPP, a free and open-source bundle of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

In this tutorial, we'll walk through the steps of downloading a WordPress site to XAMPP for local development. Let's get started!

Step 1: Install XAMPP

Before we can download our WordPress site, we need to install XAMPP on our computer. You can download the latest version of XAMPP from https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html. Once you've downloaded the installer, follow the installation steps to install XAMPP on your computer.

Step 2: Download Your WordPress Site Files

Next, you need to download your WordPress site files. If you have access to your site's cPanel, you can use the File Manager to download your site files. Alternatively, you can use an FTP client like FileZilla to download your site files.

Once you've downloaded your site files, extract them to a directory on your computer.

Step 3: Export Your WordPress Database

In addition to your site files, you also need to export your WordPress database. To do this, log in to your site's cPanel and go to phpMyAdmin. Select your site's database from the left-hand panel.

Next, click on the "Export" tab at the top of the page. Select all tables and choose "SQL" as the export format. Then click on the "Go" button to download your database file.

Step 4: Import Your WordPress Database to XAMPP

With your site files and database exported, it's time to import them to XAMPP. Open the XAMPP Control Panel and start the Apache and MySQL modules.

Next, click on the "Admin" button for the MySQL module. This will open phpMyAdmin in a new browser window.

In phpMyAdmin, create a new database for your WordPress site. Then click on the "Import" tab and choose the database file you downloaded in Step 3.

Step 5: Update Your Site URL

After importing your database, you need to update your site URL to reflect your new local development environment. To do this, open the site files you extracted in Step 2 and locate the wp-config.php file.

In this file, locate the following lines:

define('WP_HOME', 'https://example.com'); define('WP_SITEURL', 'https://example.com');

Replace the URLs with your local development environment URLs. For example:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://localhost/my-site'); define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://localhost/my-site');

Step 6: Move Your Site Files to the XAMPP Htdocs Directory

Finally, move your site files to the htdocs directory in your XAMPP installation. The htdocs directory is located in the XAMPP installation directory. For example, on Windows, the default location is C:\xampp\htdocs.

Once you've moved your site files to the htdocs directory, you can access your site by visiting http://localhost/my-site in your web browser.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we've covered the steps for downloading a WordPress site to XAMPP for local development. With XAMPP, you can easily test your WordPress site in a local environment before deploying it to the live server. Happy developing!