Reflecting on Eight Years of Local

In honor of Local’s eighth anniversary and the recent release of Local v9.1.0, I’d like to reflect on how the tool has grown and changed alongside the WordPress community throughout the years.

I can honestly say that I love and believe in Local more than ever. I’ve seen it change so much over the years, and I’m proud to have supported the product as it’s grown into a tool with more than 1.7 million downloads and 100,000 recurring monthly users.

For those unfamiliar, Local is the world’s leading local development tool for WordPress sites. It offers a free, simple way to build sites on your local machine—no matter who you are, where you host, or what you’re building. Local’s mission has always been to empower all WordPress developers with advanced workflow features. 

When I started at Flywheel more than seven years ago, Local had just become part of the Flywheel brand, and I’ve been supporting it in various ways since. At the time, our teams were thrilled to acquire this incredible tool called Pressmatic (more on that in a moment). Since then, it’s grown and improved developers’ workflows worldwide. (Fun fact: More than 80% of Local users are outside of the U.S.!)

As we celebrate Local’s eighth year, read on for a closer look at the innovations and investments that have made it one of the most beloved free tools in the WordPress community!

A brief history of Local

If you’re familiar with the WordPress ecosystem circa 2016, you may remember Pressmatic, the popular brainchild of Clay Griffiths. Pressmatic revolutionized local website development with a simple and straightforward way to spin up WordPress sites. It quickly grew in popularity, to the point that Flywheel purchased it in December 2016.

Rebranded as Local by Flywheel, the tool continued to grow, combining its original strengths with Flywheel’s design-first mindset. Over the following years, we doubled down on community-requested features and expanded Local’s offerings to include Local Pro and Local for Teams, supporting different developer workflows. We also created ways to give back to the WordPress community through open-source Add-on creation and developer programs like Local Lab.

When Flywheel and Local were acquired by WP Engine in June 2019, we took a step back to reexamine the product’s vision and mission and brought all functionality into the free version of Local, eliminating paid tiers. 

Our goal was always to make it as easy as possible for everyone to work with WordPress: a place to learn, grow, share, and build the WordPress ecosystem! 

While Local can do many things, here are a few key features we’ve added over the years that I’d be remiss not to mention! 

• Live Links: Review and test your sites with provisioned site tunnels, which transform your locally built site into a shareable environment with just a few clicks.
• Link Checker: Scan your Local site content and get a list of broken links to quickly access and update the content within WP admin.
• Image Optimizer: Scan your local site for images and compress them offline without the need for cloud-based services.
• Instant Reload: Refresh the browser window automatically when saving a CSS file, making real-time updates and reviews a breeze.
• Blueprints: Create a site by utilizing pre-saved site settings such as themes and plugins.
• Cloud Backups: Connect your local sites to your Google Drive or Dropbox to quickly save any Local site to the cloud.

Local was founded on the idea that all developers should be able to quickly and easily create, build, update, and maintain WordPress sites for everyone. We remain proud of our efforts to create a product the entire WordPress ecosystem would find valuable.

Making WordPress development accessible to all

Our belief is that building and giving back to the WordPress community starts with quality tools built with open-source values.

Over the past six years, improvements to Local included countless features that improve the workflows of all WordPress developers. From simple deployments with Local Connect and MagicSync to expanding WP-CLI functionality and opening site shell for multiple terminals, Local empowers developers to create with confidence on WordPress.

Here are just a handful of the improvements requested by the Local community that our teams have implemented over the years:

• Hot-swapping PHP environments and other site services
• Major performance improvements for the application on multiple operating systems
• Editable Live Links passwords to protect your site previews
• One-click opening your site in VS code 
• Site grouping for better organization and workflows
• Drag-and-drop imports of WP Migrate files
• Creating headless WordPress sites with a Node.js frontend

To this end, we’re always looking for user feedback, if you have feature requests or other ideas on how we can improve Local for everyone, head over the the Local community forums!

Building a community around WordPress

In addition to supporting the wider WordPress community, we’ve built the “Local Community” within our community forums! 

A core part of maintaining Local is considering the variety of users worldwide who rely on it daily. We’re proud to support the agencies and individual developers building plugins, themes, and tools within the WordPress ecosystem. Local has also been helpful in testing the latest versions and updates to WordPress core.

We believe anyone who uses Local should be able to build confidently with a safe, secure place to build, learn, and experiment with WordPress! Beyond that, Local’s development environment keeps your sites, plugins, and themes safe from outside interference.

Both at Flywheel and WP Engine, the team behind Local has demonstrated its commitment to supporting users in the forums by fixing product bugs, taking feature suggestions, troubleshooting issues, providing a space to learn WordPress, and discussing workflow hacks. 

Looking to the future

Local has always been free—that’s not going to change. We want to keep building for the future and making WordPress accessible to all.

This includes keeping Local up-to-date with the latest versions of WordPress and PHP, addressing community and security issues promptly, and ensuring compatibility and performance as technology evolves.

“We’re passionate about what Local empowers developers to do,” said Local Senior Product Manager Austin Wendt.

“Whether it’s working on a site build or just creating a sandbox to test out the latest technologies, we want Local to be a place for everyone building with WordPress. Our focus has been and will continue to be on creating the best possible development tool for WordPress users, no matter what plugins they use, where they host, or what type of sites they build.”

For my part, I’ll continue to support this incredible community and keep powering the freedom to create on WordPress by harnessing the power of Local.