This won’t be relevant for many people reading this blog, but I’m posting on the off chance that it’s useful to someone frantically Googling “how to set up a local version of a WordPress site“, and not finding anything that worked completely.
(Much like I was for the past two hours).
There are multiple useful resources. This one for an outline of the duplication process, as is this one.
The problem is that both didn’t quite work, and I could find a resource that successfully answered the question “why do I only have a functional WordPress backend and access to my homepage, but every other page gives an error message?”
So if you’re seeing something like the image below, and only your homepage works after a WordPress migration, try these things.
Try this list of things first, which I collated from various guides and StackOverflow questions (for all of them replace the URL with your relevant localhost URL):
Most people seemed to achieve success somewhere in that list, but I needed two more steps:
Now I have a functional local version of my WordPress site so I can tinker and break things without fear of public embarrassment ????