WordPress provides a way to create websites on your Windows desktop

Last month, WordPress released a way to create or test WordPress sites on a desktop computer, but the application 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 make up over 25% of WordPress developers. However, it’s possible that non-developers who use WordPress on their websites could account for many more people using WordPress and wanting to learn to develop with it.

WordPress Studio is an easy-to-use development platform that will help developers using Microsoft Windows, as well as non-developers who want to learn how to use WordPress without breaking anything on a live website.

The official WordPress announcement explained:

“We recently launched Studio, our free, open-source, local WordPress development environment, for macOS and are excited to announce that the Windows version of Studio is now available!

As a reminder, we built Studio to be the fastest and easiest way to build WordPress sites locally.”

Local WordPress development

Local development is a way of working on a website from your computer (local), as opposed to working on a website on a web server. There are many reasons to work on a website locally, and convenience is number one. When working on a website directly in a desktop environment, it is unlikely that an error will occur that could make the site public and cause unintended ranking consequences for the actual site on the Internet, which is the second reason for the popularity of local development.

The third reason for local development is that it is cheaper, faster, and for people with less programming skills, is generally easier than creating an online test site to test new plugins to see if they will break the site or simply to create a demo site to share with a client or team.

The downside to local development so far is that many of the most popular local development platforms require a long learning curve, which is inconvenient for publishers and SMBs who don’t have time to learn another skill. I know about the learning curve because I have used several local development platforms in the past.

WordPress studio

WordPress has now released a solution to the local WordPress development problem that is 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 mess up a WordPress site, and until now there hasn’t been an easy way to test WordPress plugins without spending extra money or just learning how to use WordPress.

WordPress lists the following benefits:

• Demo pages
  Forget about Ngrok tunnels – share interactive snapshots of your local sites with clients or colleagues using WordPress.com.
• Super-fast WordPress installation
  No matter how many sites you’re working on, you can create an unlimited number of local sites in Studio.
• A building free from dependencies
  Create lightweight and reliable local WordPress sites, powered by WordPress Playground, without the hassle of Docker, NGINX, Apache or MySQL.
• One-click administrator
  Spend less time wondering about passwords – open WP Admin for any site with one click.
• Open your website 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 greatest contributor to the WordPress core
  Thanks to 109 active collaborators, 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 demo sites with other team members or clients to get feedback and iteratively improve your site. The user must first create a WordPress.com account and connect the local Studio desktop application to the WordPress account. Users can host five demo sites for free on a temporary domain (WP.build). Free demo sites are valid for 7 days from the last update of the demo site, so if you want to stay longer, just update the demo site.

All demo sites can be manually removed from the hosted demo as well as from your computer.

A screenshot of how to delete a website in Studio

Support for exporting the theme

The WordPress Studio local development environment has a theme export feature. Users can create a theme in their desktop environment and then choose to export it. Studio will export the theme as a ZIP file, which you can then upload to your live site (or staging environment) online.

Full instructions on how to use Studio are available on WordPress.com. Judging by the instructions, Studio seems much easier to use compared to other local development solutions, which are generally geared to support a wide range of websites, not just WordPress sites. The learning curve appears to be relatively mild compared to other local development environments.

Read more about the Windows version of WordPress Studio:

Studio: Now available for Windows

Download the Studio version for Windows or Mac. Both versions are free:

Create fast, ship faster with Studio