How to install WordPress and Woocommerce Step by Step — Part 1 of 2

I’m a huge advocate for WordPress, I’ve been using the platform ever since my days at University, almost 13/14 years ago.

Back then the system wasn’t so solid, it didn’t come with all the bells and whistles and was very much focused on the blogging community. Today it is used in almost 33% of all websites that are launched.

WordPress is one of the most extendable CMS systems that I’ve had the pleasure of working on/with. One of the major areas I like about WordPress is its ability to go from website to e-commerce in just a matter of clicks.

If you’re new to WordPress and want to know how to install your own version along with Woocommerce on your local machine then this is the tutorial for you.

What you’ll need

You’re going to need a few initial bits and pieces to begin with these include:

1. An Server, have a look at MAMP, WAMP or LAMP
2. A database setup on MySQL (this comes in your server download package)
3. A copy of Wordpress, you can downlaod a copy from WordPress.org. Make sure you copy all the files from the newly downloaded WordPress folder to your, either the, htdocs or www directory that comes with your chosen server.

That’s it.

Let’s get started:

Step 1: Fire up your local server.

Open WAMP/LAMP/MAMP and click start, this will fire up the server and give you access to the localhost.

Open your favourite browsers, this could be Safari, Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

In the address bar at the top, type in http://localhost/<name of your directory>

You should see a screen like this one.

Step 2: Setup your database

In all honesty, you could do this at the start, however, if you haven’t done this part let's do it now.

So to do this you’re going to open a new tab and type http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

PHPmyAdmin is a database administration tool and provides a GUI (Graphical User Interface to enable you to administer your databases.

When you load this up you will see a screen similar to this one

Now we’re going to need to create a new database, to do that, click on databases

This will give you the screen above, give your database a name, I’m going to call mine ‘storeexample’.

Once you hit create you will see a screen like this one:

As you can see, there isn’t much more we can do in here, sure we could create some custom tables, but we don’t need to do that. So lets go back to our initial WordPress screen on the previous tab.

Step 3: WordPress Installation

Remember our previous screen? Great lets choose our chosen language and then hit continue:

Ok so you’ve now set the language for your WordPress installation now hit continue and you’ll be presented with the screen below:

You don’t need to worry too much about this, basically it's telling you about what you’re going to do over the next few minutes.

Hit the Let’s go button and lets get on with some real work.

From here you will need to enter the name of your database that you set in the previous step.

Then you’re going to need your username, for most systems this is root, however, on a live server this would be different.

Your password, again for a local machine this is often ‘root’ or can be left blank. If you have set an alternative password in your htconf file, then please ensure you use that password here.

So with that now all filled in, let's click the submit button.

If you’ve done everything correctly you should see a screen like this.

Lets hit run the installation and see what it does next.

That’s it, your WordPress system is installed. If you were to click on your database tab now, you will see a collection of tables in there which relates to your WordPress installation.

Now lets give our store a title, setup a username, provide our email address and a password so we can get in. As we’re doing this locally I’m going to keep mine simple.

That’s it, we’re all done we will now be presented with the screen below, and this tells us that the WordPress CMS system has been installed successfully.

Have a go at doing this yourself on your local machine, let me know how you get on in the comments below.

Part 2 will be available shortly for now just focus on getting WordPress installed on your local machine.

Part 2 is now available right here.