My Local Development Environment
A local development environment is like a flight simulator for web development. It is different from a production development environment because whereas a production site is a published website that is live, online, and can be seen by the end-user in public, a web site on a local development environment is only seen by you. This is because your computer is seen like a “web hosting service” to your local development environment.
It is important to use a local environment for development because it allows you to experiment and make changes to the code of a web page without running the risk of breaking the site. Yes, you can make changes to a WordPress site on the back-end of the live site, but the safer route would be to make a copy of your production site into your local environment on your computer. Here, you can try out, test, and troubleshoot the changes you’ve made to the website in the staging phase without running the possibility of breaking the live site in the production phase. This is very helpful for maintaining a WordPress site in addition to developing one for the first time.
I prefer my local environment to look exactly like my production environment because this is where I feel I can fully benefit from having a local development environment. I want my local server on my computer to look, feel, and behave as though it is a live web hosted server. This way the staging website will emulate the finished product as if it was already online, before it becomes a production site.