Create a WordPress Test Site in Just 5 Minutes

If you’ve ever experienced the WordPress “white screen of death,” applying plugin, theme or WordPress updates can be nerve-racking. Especially for me since I manage sites for clients, the last thing I want to do is be responsible for taking a site offline that doesn’t belong to me.

For years I’ve run WordPress sites in my own testing environment on my computer. Yes, I’m a WordPress developer but I feel that anyone responsible for a live site should have a testing environment. And you don’t have to be a developer to run websites from your computer. In fact, you can have a WordPress site running on your computer in about five minutes.

There are several important benefits from running a test environment for your WordPress sites:

You can try out new themes, plugins, and experiment with settings without affecting your live site.

You can apply plugin updates or WordPress core updates to ensure they are safe for your live site.

It’s fast: you can see changes immediately which is great for style tweaks.

You can practice backing up your live site and restoring it in your test environment so you can be prepared in case your site is hacked.

I wanted to run my own test environment on a USB stick for convenient sharing between computers and I recorded the setup. Even though this video is over 15 minutes long, if I wasn’t talking though the steps you’ll see you can install the software to run WordPress in five minutes.

In the video, I install XAMPP software which installs and runs all the components needed to run WordPress on your computer. It’s 100% free and as you’ll see in the video, very easy to install.

[embed width=“640” height=“360” ]http://youtu.be/rpW8tj2aPOY[/embed]