Meet Studio: Your New Favorite Way to Develop WordPress Locally

Wojtek Naruniec

April 24

Say goodbye to manual tool configuration, slow site setup, and clunky local development workflows, and say hello to Studio by WordPress.com, our new, free, open source local WordPress development environment.

We've built Studio to be the fastest and simplest way to build WordPress sites locally.

Designed to empower developers, designers, and site builders, Studio offers a seamless solution for creating and running WordPress sites directly on your local machine, as well as showcasing work-in-progress sites with your clients, teams, and colleagues.

Check out a few of our favorite features in the video below:

A new way to develop WordPress locally, available for free

Studio is now available to use for free on Mac*, and you can get up and running with a new local site in just a few minutes:

Download Studio for Mac.
Install and open Studio.
Click Add site, and you're done!

Once you have a local site running, you can access WP Admin, the Site Editor, global styles, and patterns, all with just one click—and without needing to remember and enter a username or password.

You can even open your local sites in your favorite development tools, such as VS Code, PhpStorm, Terminal, and Finder, making it even easier to add Studio to your existing development workflow.

Plus, Studio is open source; feel free to fork away on GitHub.

*A Windows version of Studio is coming soon, and you can request early access here.

Effortlessly share your work and keep moving forward

In the realm of web development, showcasing local work has often been a challenge when projects live solely on your machine. With Studio's demo sites, you have a convenient, built-in solution for sharing your progress with your team, clients, or designers.

These publicly-accessible demo sites, hosted on WordPress.com, are a convenient way to share your work without the need for complex server setups or lengthy deployments. In less than 15 seconds, you can have a shareable link to your local site that stays active for seven days.

The best part? Demo sites can be refreshed to reflect your latest build, allowing you to easily convey any updates or changes!

a cursor clicking a blue Add demo site button

Breaking free from traditional constraints

Unlike traditional local environment tools like MAMP or Docker, Studio takes a fresh approach to local WordPress development. Studio is a lightweight and efficient solution that minimizes overhead and maximizes simplicity by forgoing the need for web servers, MySQL servers, or virtualization technologies.

Behind the scenes, Studio uses WordPress Playground, the WebAssembly-powered PHP binary. Thanks to this technology, there is no need to use a traditional web server, making your development experience much quicker and smoother.

Say goodbye to complex setups and compatibility issues. Studio makes it easier than ever to build and manage WordPress sites locally.

a cursor clicking a white Add Site button on Studio by WordPress.com

Let's get building

At WordPress.com, we're committed to making your website management experience seamless. In the last few years alone, we launched staging sites with synchronization features, SSH and WP-CLI access, global edge caching, GitHub Deployments, and more.

Studio is yet another powerful feature to add to your toolkit. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and remember to follow our blog to stay in the loop.

And, of course, download Studio today. Your local development workflow will thank you.

Major kudos to the Studio team on this launch! Antonio Sejas, Antony Agrios, Kateryna Kodonenko, Philip Jackson, Carlos García Prim, David Calhoun, Derek Blank, Siobhan Bamber, Tanner Stokes, Matt West, Adam Zielinski, Brandon Payton, Berislav Grgicak, Alexa Peduzzi, Jeremy Massel, Gio Lodi, Olivier Halligon, Matthew Denton, Ian Stewart, Daniel Bachhuber, Kei Takagi, Claudiu Filip, Niranjan Uma Shankar, Noemí Sánchez, and our beta testers.