3 Tips for running WordPress on Windows

After running this site using WordPress on Windows for 5 years or so, it’s about time I offered some tips for WordPress on Windows.

1. Don’t do it
2. Don’t do it
3. Don’t do it

It’s called LAMP for a reason. L=Linux, A=Apache, M=MySQL, P=PHP. There’s no mention of ‘W’ for Windows or ‘I’ for Internet Information Services.

First problem you’ll find is that the Microsoft Web Installer does a great job of doing the basic install, but some of the folder security won’t be quite right so there’ll be problems updating and installing plugins and graphics. Each time you change the rights it will work, but new folders will still have the wrong rights.

Next up, every time you have a problem and try and search online, you’ll find lots of information about running WordPress on Linux. Much of the Windows information is out of date. Sometimes it’s just plain wrong.

If that’s not enough, the PHP version is old and doesn’t appear to be updateable. That makes it slow. It may be insecure, I don’t know.

On the bright side, making SSL work on Windows is much easier, but you only need to do that once in a blue moon.

So, after five years, I’ve just moved this site to Linux. If you’re used to Windows (like me), it’s quite a shock to the system, but there’s plenty of help out there. I’ve found the Digital Ocean pages very helpful. You’ll also need to come to terms with Putty (or similar) and WinSCP for accessing the server and files.

As an extra bonus, you’ll need a smaller server. This current site is using Ubuntu 18 on Microsoft Azure. The server is a mere 1 CPU with 2GB RAM. Admittedly, traffic is fairly low, but this is half the size of the old server saving both hardware and Windows licence costs.