A few years ago, the only way to develop WordPress themes, plugins, or manage sites without risking the live environment was through local development. This system often became resource-intensive, leading to additional challenges and the need for alternative solutions. In this article, we will discuss these challenges and explore effective solutions.
Table of Contents
Understanding Local Development
Local development in the context of WordPress involves building new products like themes or plugins, or making changes to a WordPress website on a local machine, such as your computer. This setup means that only you and those you grant access to can view these files in a browser.
Importance of Local Development Tools
Local development tools allow you to build, test, and run WordPress products. With several tools in play such as LocalWP, Apache or Nginx, and database, you can choose how your local development environment is configured. For example, you can tone down access restrictions to files if you are not interfacing with a live environment.
Benefits of Local Development For WordPress
Local development for WordPress offers several advantages, notably speed. When creating themes, plugins, or components from scratch, it’s more efficient to avoid constantly pushing changes to a repository and pulling them to a server. This saves significant time, allowing you to focus on more critical aspects of your development.
Overview of popular local development tools (LocalWP, XAMPP, MAMP, etc.)
These are all suitable and similar local development tools that can be systematically deployed for WordPress local development.
LocalWP is a popular local development tool designed primarily for WordPress developers. It offers an interface that helps developers set up and manage local WordPress sites.
Challenges of Local Development with LocalWP
LocalWP packs some impressive features. However, you can’t also throw away all the challenges that local development with LocalWP poses. Let’s examine some of these challenges:
Limited accessibility and data loss risks
One of the challenges users face using LocalWP is limited accessibility and data loss risks. LocalWP is not optimized for a wide variety of users. For example, LocalWP will need a computer with considerable memory to run multiple websites smoothly. And if you are a Linux user, sorry, you will not be able to access the environment.
Furthermore, due to timeouts, slow download speeds, and inability to use htaccess, you run the risk of losing critical data.
Collaboration Issues
LocalWP does not allow two developers to work on the same website or project simultaneously from different machines. This limitation is particularly challenging in a team setting where real-time collaboration is crucial for seamless and rapid development.
Performance differences between local and live environments
Performance differences between local and live environments are noticeable and can be frustrating for developers using LocalWP. Website components often look different in the live environment compared to the local setup, especially when using a page builder like Elementor.
Additionally, the need to limit the number of plugins in the local environment due to speed concerns can negatively impact your site when it goes live.
Migration challenges to hosting providers
A common question is how to host a website developed on LocalWP on a custom host without extra cost, time, and effort.? It is no secret that LocalWP limits support for hosting with custom hosts other than WPEngine. This is a significant drawback to WordPress development and hosting flexibility because transferring to other hosts would require additional steps or third-party plugins.
No Provision for Templating
A major drawback of LocalWP is its lack of templating features. This limits developers’ ability to optimize their products for easy and profitable distribution. How so.
Typically, templating allows developers to create a design and development structure that can be replicated quickly across multiple projects, ensuring consistency and saving time. Without this functionality, each new project or website must be configured from scratch, which is not only time-consuming but also increases the risk of inconsistencies between projects.
InstaWP: A Better Alternative Solution To Local Development
InstaWP is easier to get started with than LocalWP and other local development solutions. Before we dive into why you should use InstaWP, let us examine what InstaWP is and what makes it a better choice for WordPress development agencies and developers.
Overview of InstaWP
InstaWP is a WordPress environment for developing, testing, and managing your WordPress site. InstaWp does not require any setup on your local machine and it will help you spin up a new WordPress site within seconds.
Features and Benefits of InstaWP
InstaWP is a WordPress development environment that goes beyond all the features of well-known development environments. This WordPress Staging tool gives developers and agencies robust customizable WordPress development environment solutions.
Let’s explore some of these fixtures:
Create WordPress Site In Seconds
You don’t need a special workspace or a particular kind of machine to start using InstaWP. With a few clicks, InstaWP will create a new WordPress site for you in the cloud.
Create template
InstaWP gives developers and agencies the unique feature of creating templates to simplify their development process and eliminate unnecessary repetition.
Hosting with InstaWP
InstaWP’s hosting for WordPress is carefully designed for developers and agencies looking for out-of-the-box cloud hosting solutions for their InstaWP sites. Go to this link to learn more about the best hosting service you get.
Manage multiple websites
InstaWP is a powerful website management tool. Thinking about those 100s of websites and how to manage them one after the other can be scary when you’re crunch on time. Without compromising on speed, InstaWP will bring all your sites into one dashboard for you to see and manage
Edit Code, Edit Database, and View Logs
Without leaving your InstaWP dashboard for any other site or app, you can edit all your website code, edit your site database, and view error logs. These codes include HTML, CSS, and PHP, making implementing changes and testing new features in real-time easy.
Additionally, you can edit your site database from the same dashboard.
Seamless Collaboration
As agencies, InstaWP allows you to collaborate across your development spectrum. You can have multiple developers working on a single project seamlessly.
Magic Login to WordPress Dashboard
You don’t need to copy URL to access your WordPress site admin panel. You can log in to your WordPress admin panel in InstaWP with one click.
Pull/Push Changes
InstaWP allows you to seamlessly pull your live site to its development and testing environment. For instance; InstaWP only needs your live site URL to pull your live site and install a copy version for testing and management purposes.
Secondly, InstaWP has a dedicated plugin called InstaWP Connect that acts as the gateway between your live site and the InstaWP development environment. Install the InstaWP Connect plugin and see our magical pull/push feature in action.
How InstaWP addresses the challenges of local development
Having seen the benefits of using InstaWP, let us examine critically how InstaWP addresses the challenges that local development presents.
InstaWP Solves Accessibility and Data Loss Risk
Unlike Local development, which requires considerable computer memory and is not fully supportive of Linux users, InstaWP operates entirely in the cloud. This means developers can initiate and access their WordPress sites from any machine without specific hardware requirements, thus eliminating the risk of data loss due to local machine failures or limitations.
InstaWP Enhances Collaboration
One of the biggest limitations of Local development is its inability to support real-time collaboration thereby limiting WordPress agencies working on multiple projects. InstaWP resolves this by allowing multiple developers to work on the same project from different locations simultaneously and share real-time progress with customers
InstaWP Solves the Performance Differences Between Local and Live Environments
InstaWP minimizes the discrepancies often seen between local and live environments by allowing developers to create and test sites directly in an environment that closely mirrors live hosting conditions. This ensures that themes and plugins perform consistently across both stages, reducing surprises during deployment.
Flexible Hosting Solution and Freedom
InstaWP offers flexible hosting solutions and simplifies the migration process with features like direct connection to live environments, reducing the time, cost, and complexity associated with deploying sites to various hosts.
Provide For Templating
InstaWP addresses this critical shortfall by offering templating features. Developers and agencies can create templates that can be reused across multiple projects, ensuring consistency and drastically reducing the time needed to set up new WordPress sites.
Using InstaWP as your Online Development environment
As a WordPress developer or WordPress development agency, your best bet at beating the challenges posed by the local development environment is to use InstaWP. With InstaWP, you can do the following:
Creating staging sites and templates
With InstaWP online development, you can create as many staging sites as you need. Creating a staging site in InstaWP is effortless. It takes a few seconds to signup if you don’t already have an account. InstaWP makes it very easy to create an account. Check it out here.
After creating a staging site, InstaWP allows you to turn that staging site into a master template from which future websites can be created. In addition to creating a master template for future WordPress development purposes; your templates can be monetized.
Code and DB editing with InstaWP
Code editing and database editing capabilities are what InstaWP combines with other important features to make its online development environment holistic for agencies and developers. From inside your InstaWP, you can easily edit your theme, plugin, and WordPress core code.
Using InstaWP for Seamless Migration
InstaWP online development environment prioritizes seamless migration. Our seamless migration feature will help you take your site from the development environment to live. We have 3 options for you to migrate your site: Migrate your site to our managed WordPress hosting, or migrate via URL to any hosting you choose.
Hosting your Site with InstaWP Live
InstaWP hosting solution is specifically tailored to cater to developers and agencies building WordPress sites in the InstaWP online development environment. Everything is cloud-based based, including strong backups for your site. Depending on the number of sites, you should be able to choose the appropriate hosting package from our flexible hosting options, and your site will go live instantly.
Remote Management and 2-way Sync
InstaWP online development environment allows developers and agencies to remotely make changes to the live site via a 2-way sync function. The 2-way sync function is ensured by our plugin called InstaWP Connect. Install InstaWP Connect in your live site and sync it to InstaWP WP development environment. From there, you can easily create a copy of your live site, make changes, and sync the changes to your live site.
Demo and Project Sharing (with Clients)
Nothing excites and encourages clients more than being able to see real progress on what they have spent top dollars on. For developers and agencies, nothing makes your work easier than being able to get feedback on that project. InstaWP online development environment not only lets you create a staging site, but it goes further by letting you share a demo of that site with clients.
Conclusion
InstaWP offers a comprehensive and efficient solution for WordPress development challenges that are often encountered in local development environments. By providing robust features like a cloud-based development environment, seamless collaboration, flexible hosting, and templating capabilities, InstaWP enhances productivity and streamlines workflows for developers and WordPress agencies.
FAQ
1. What is LocalWP?
LocalWP is used for setting up and managing local WordPress environments.
2. What are the main challenges of using LocalWP?
The main challenges include limited accessibility for certain operating systems, data loss risks, difficulty in collaboration, performance discrepancies between local and live environments, and migration limitations to some hosting providers.
3. How does InstaWP improve upon the challenges of LocalWP?
InstaWP addresses these challenges by offering a cloud-based development environment that supports seamless collaboration, minimizes performance differences, and provides flexible hosting solutions and templating capabilities.
4. Can InstaWP create WordPress sites quicker than LocalWP?
Yes, InstaWP can spin up new WordPress sites in the cloud within seconds with just a few clicks.
5. Does InstaWP support real-time sync?
Yes, InstaWP allows a 2-way sync for seamless pulling from live site and pushing to live site.