How to clone your website on your local computer

Technical level: Advanced.

For simpler methods, simply use Duplicator plugin or All in one WordPress migration.

To clone your website locally, you will first need a server. The easiest way to do this is to install the WAMP server. You can download it from http://www.wampserver.com/en/ . After you install it, you will need to start the server and some of other services such as MySQL, but before you do that you will need to enable the rewrite module. You can do this by clicking on the WAMP icon in the system tray, selecting Apache > Apache modules as you can see in the following screenshot: Enable mod rewrite

Next, you will need to start services: Start services

Once you have the server and services running, you can now copy your website. Navigate to the www directory and create a new directory inside it; you can name it as your domain, as you can see in this screenshot: Create the local website directory

Now, open that directory and connect to your website through FTP. Download everything into that directory. Download files through FTP

The next thing is to copy your website’s database and install it on your local computer. You can do that using the WP Migrate DB plugin(https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-migrate-db/). Once you install it and activate it on your live website, go to Tools > Migrate DB and configure the paths: Export database

Click the Export button and download the file. It will contain the database dump which now you will need to import to your local MySQL server. Before that, there are a couple things you need to do:
1) Connect to your MySQL server and create a database. Preferably named as the one you have on your live server(you can find that in your wp-config.php file)

2) Open the wp-config.php file and update the user name and password. Since your local database server will use other credentials than the remote one. For the user name, it will be root, while the password should be blank since WAMP doesn’t create a password for the root user. Save the wp-sonfig.php file.

3) Open a browser window and type: http://localhost/phpmyadmin. Once you have connected to your database server, navigate to SQL tab and create your database. You can do that by typing:

CREATE DATABASE the-db-name-here; 

and click the GO button.

4) Open the sql export file the WP Migrate DB generated for you and copy its content. Paste it into the SQL window and click the GO button again. Make sure the correct database is selected.

At this point, everything should work, so if you visit now: http://localhost/your-website you should be able to see a perfect replica of your live website.