Why You Should Develop Websites Locally | EP 619

Why You Should Develop Websites Locally

1. Saving time  00:37
2. Security and privacy  02:22
3. No Internet connection needed  03:05

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast brought to you by WP Gears I’m David Blackmon

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler

00:37 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about why you should consider developing websites locally Tim why don’t you tell our audience what that means.

00:45 Tim Strifler:  Yeah so developing locally is when you use your local computer as a server. Essentially so traditionally when you’re building a website you are connecting to a server right and you’re logged into your WordPress admin website on that server and when you’re saving you’re making changes your browser, is you know you click Save and it’s going up to the server and then it’s saving. Well with when you’re developing locally you’re using  some sort of a software that’s all allowing you to turn your local computer into essentially a server which means faster more secure we’re and talk all about that but in a second.  Here I’m not going to step on those points that we haven’t gotten to but that’s essentially what developing locally means and there’s a lot of benefits that come with it. And so the first one is developing locally saves you time because it’s faster processing. So right so because you’re not saving to the Internet you know your your browser’s not connecting via the Internet to a server that might be in a different state or even a  different country even. And so because of that it saves a lot of time when you click Save it’s like instant. Additionally it’s a really fastest spin of websites if you’re using a tool like local by Flywheel which by the way is our recommended tool for local development. You can create a new site within seconds and you can even clone sites and do all these different things rather than having to go through a cPanel or your hosting account to spin up a new site and wait for it to be provisioned, and all that it happens almost instantly and so you save a ton of time developing locally.

02:22 David Blackmon: Second point is developing locally is more secure and private. obviously if you’re doing it on your computer at home you’re not it’s not connected that environments not connected to the Internet like a web server is so it’s going to be more secure much more. Private obviously your computer’s connected to the internet so technically I guess if there’s some IT guys out there that are saying yes you know but guess what I’m gonna say I could unplug that internet cable to my computer and still work on my website. Locally on my machine and therein lies the thing it’s it’s more secure and private.

03:05 Tim Strifler: Yeah and that actually leads well into the third point here developing locally allows you to do build your website without having an internet connection. So for example if  you are on an airplane flying you don’t have enter now you don’t want to pay for the Wi-Fi the expensive Airport airplane Wi-Fi so you can was yeah it’s it’s very  slow and very inconsistent and so you can essentially build your website or build a website without an internet connection. Now certain things might get difficult if you need to go and you know find different design assets and stuff like that but you can actually work on the site without internet which is pretty cool. 

03:40 David Blackmon: Well a couple of other tools that we recommend checking out. If you obviously Flywheel is our number one choice but also there’s a great company out there in the WordPress community and they do a lot at Word camps and stuff is server press so if you want to actually set up your own local environment and stuff. You can check out server press as well but as Tim said Flywheels pretty e asy I mean click click boom and you’re done. So I think you know as a non tech person Flywheel is even easier than server press and stuff because messing with command lines sometime is  not fun. So all right yeah tomorrow we’ve got another great topic Tim..

04:22 Tim Strifler: Take care bye bye.

04:24 David Blackmon: Until tomorrow we’ll see you then.