Nowadays everything is done at a fast pace, therefore, to catch up with others in this competitive market you need to be fast enough.

WordPress is the latest buzz nowadays in the market and 28% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online(data taken from wordpress.org).

Let’s talk about our topic “How to speed up your WordPress development”.

There are two ways to speed up your WordPress development.

  1. Setting up a WordPress child theme
  2. Installing WordPress on a local machine( Desktop or laptop)

A. Setting up a WordPress child theme

This is the most ignored thing which actually plays an important role in speeding up the WordPress development.

A WordPress child theme is a WordPress theme which inherits the functionalities and styling of the parent WordPress Theme.

Using a child theme is a good practice to modify the parent theme. I always recommend this to all my clients.

To know more about Child theme read my post “What is a child theme and Why you should be using it?

Benefits of using it

  1. Users can lose all the changes done in the function or styling of the parent theme files if the parent theme is updated.
  2. If any of your changes or modification in the child theme goes wrong, your parent theme is still safe.
  3. It will help you to speed up the web development process.
  4. It is also a great of learning about WordPress core functionalities.

B. Installing WordPress on a local machine( Desktop or laptop)

I have seen many people developing their site directly on the web hosting that can actually cause the development process little slow ( you can read here “How to set up the WordPress on Windows“).

I have listed few issues that I have found while working directly with a web hosting,

  • Web Server can go down or slow.
  • Log in and log out an issue on web hosting
  • Good internet speed
  • Most importantly it’s Live if you haven’t put coming soon page.

I always prefer developing WordPress site locally on my machine and then migrating it to the web hosting. It can be done by installing WAMP (for windows) and MAMP (For Mac) on your local machine.

Below are some of the amazing benefits you get once you start developing your WordPress website locally.

1. The best part of developing a website on a local machine are followings

a. I don’t need a dedicated internet connection.

b. Once I have downloaded all the plugins and theme I can work on it without using a network connection.

Isn’t this so exciting that on holidays you can take your laptop to any place even without a good internet connection and still be productive.

Productive but how?

1. Because you can still work on your website even internet is not there.

 2. The development process is very fast. When you develop your website on the local machine your web server and database all are on your laptop or machine only. This makes the working on it super fast.

3. While working on a web hosting every time you refresh or load your page or download new plugins or theme the request directly goes to the web server and that can take time.

4. You can experiment with PHP or Html codes because you can anytime fix it. All the files and codes are on your laptop itself.

5.  Its a one time process of setting up the development environment on your local machine ( you can read here “How to set up the WordPress on Windows” ) once you have completed it and then you play around with codes, themes and plugins.

Now the question is “How to set up the WordPress on Windows” for that you can read my another post. You can set up the WordPress on your local machine using WAMP.

Most importantly it will let you experiment with WordPress code. Also,  you learn each and everything about WordPress set up as well as migration from a local machine to Web hosting.

If you are a newbie to WordPress and want to learn it then this will be a great option for you.

As you don’t have to purchase a hosting or a domain name.

Once your website is completed on the local machine then purchase a hosting.

Migrate the WordPress files from your local machine to web hosting.