Last month WordPress released a way to create or test WordPress sites on the desktop but the app was limited to Apple Mac devices. This month WordPress announces that WordPress Studio is now available for Microsoft Windows.
According to WordPress, Microsoft Windows users account for over 25% of WordPress developers. But it’s possible that non-developers who use WordPress for their websites may account for many more people who use WordPress and would like to learn how to create with it.
WordPress Studio is an easy to use development platform that will help developers who use Microsoft Windows as well as non-developers who want to learn how to use WordPress without messing anything up on a live website.
The official WordPress announcement explained:
“We recently launched Studio, our free and open source local WordPress development environment, for MacOS, and we’re happy to share that the Windows version of Studio is now available!
As a reminder, we’ve built Studio to be the fastest and simplest way to build WordPress sites locally.”
Local WordPress Development
Local development is a way to work on a website from the desktop (local) as opposed to working on the site on a webhost. There are many reasons to work on a website locally, with convenience being at the top of the list. Working on a website directly on a desktop environment makes it unlikely for a mistake that could cause the site to go public and causing unintended ranking consequences for the actual site that’s live on the web, which is a second reason why local development is popular.
A third reason for local development is that it’s cheaper, faster and for those with less development skills, it’s generally easier than creating an online testing site for the purpose of testing new plugins to verify they won’t break a site or simply for creating a demo site for sharing with a client or a team.
Until now, the downside of local development is that many of the most popular local development platforms have a steep learning curve which is inconvenient for publishers and SMBs who don’t have the time to devote to learning yet another skill. I know about the learning curve because I’ve used a few local development platforms in the past.
WordPress Studio
WordPress has now released a solution to the problem of local WordPress development that’s specific to WordPress and makes it easier for WordPress users to test, develop and learn how to become more comfortable with WordPress. It’s easy to break a WordPress site and until now there was never an easy way to test WordPress plugins without additional expense or to just plain old learn how to use WordPress.
WordPress lists the following benefits:
- Demo sites
Forget Ngrok-like tunnels—share interactive snapshots of your local sites with clients or colleagues, powered by WordPress.com. - Superfast WordPress installation
Regardless of how many sites you’re working on, you can create unlimited local sites in Studio. - Dependency-free building
Build lightweight and reliable local WordPress sites, powered by WordPress Playground, without the hassle of Docker, NGINX, Apache, or MySQL. - One-click admin
Spend less time wrangling passwords—open WP Admin for each site with just one click. - Open your site anywhere
Develop your sites your way. Open your site’s code in your favorite IDE, CLI, or file browser to fit your workflow. - Built by the biggest contributor to WordPress core
With 109 active contributors, we know WordPress inside and out.
Create And Share A Demo Site
One of the fantastic features of WordPress Studio is the ability to share your demo sites with others on your team or with clients, to get feedback and iteratively improve the website. A user first needs to create a WordPress.com account and connect the local Studio desktop app to the WordPress account. Users are able to host five demo sites for free on a temporary domain (WP.build). Free demo sites last for 7 days after the last update to the demo site so if you need it to stay longer just update the demo site.
All demo sites can be manually deleted from the hosted demo and also on the desktop.
Screenshot Of How To Delete A Website In Studio
Support For Exporting A Theme
The WordPress Studio local development environment has the functionality for exporting a theme. Users can create a theme on their desktop environment and then select to export the theme. The Studio app will export the theme as a zip file which can then be uploaded to a live site (or a staging environment) online.
Full instructions on how to use Studio is available on WordPress.com. Judging by the instructions, using Studio appears to be a lot easier to use compared to other local development solutions that in general are made to accommodate a wide range of websites, not just WordPress sites. The learning curve appears to be relatively gentle compared to other local development environments.
Read more about the Windows version of WordPress Studio:
Studio: Now Available for Windows
Download a Windows or Mac version of Studio, both versions are free:
