Introduction: Developing and Deploying WordPress for Free
So in this video, we're going to see how we can easily set up our own computer to be able to build our websites on. Then we're going to take it to the next level where we're going to push that completed site up to the actual server and make it live. Now the best part of all of this is everything I'm going to show you today, all the tools, are 100% free, no cost whatsoever.
So first of all, we need to have some way of setting up our own computer to be able to run our actual copies of WordPress. To do that, we're going to be using the free Local.
Installing WordPress with the Local App
This is a very simple tool. Now, there are other ways in which you can do this and other tools, but I do think Local is probably the easiest one to set up and get up and running. We don't need to worry about any kind of technical things. So all we need to do is simply come over, choose the download option, choose your platform. So this will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so you've got all the options you should need. For my case, I'm going to use Apple Silicon. Once you've downloaded that, you just simply go ahead and install it.
Once installed and activated, this is the first screen you're going to see. You can see this tells us, "Looks like you haven't created any sites." So let's do that. Let's create our new site. So we can choose to create a new site or create from a blueprint. Now, blueprints are setups you can save as part of Local, and then you can use those to rapidly deploy a site to start building. Great way of working. You want to check out a blueprint, you can take a look here where I've covered my exact blueprint setup. For this example, though, we're going to keep this simple and create a new site.
Click continue. We'll give this a name. We can open the advanced options, and you can see we can set up some other information. I'd recommend leaving this for default for most use cases anyway. We click continue. We can then set up the preferred environment, so things like the PHP version, MySQL, and those kinds of things, or we can customize this. Let's leave it at preferred. That should be good for most of us.
Then we can give this a username, we can give it a password, and finally, if you want to set your development email, you can add that inside here. Again, we have some more advanced options, but all this allows you to do is choose whether this is a multisite or just one single WordPress site. This example, it's just a standard site, so we'll click add new. That's now going to go through, download the latest copy of WordPress, set that up on our local machine, and have everything up and running in a matter of seconds.
A Guided Tour of the Local App Interface
And there we go, everything is now ready and running. Simple as that. It couldn't get much easier. So let's take a quick look at the interface so you get a feel for what you can do here. And then we'll take a look at our site and we'll take a look at how we can migrate this to the live site when everything is ready to go.
So we take a look down the left-hand side, we've got some basic options. So we can see our local sites which are on our computer itself. We can then go and take a look at connecting. So this is only really applicable if you're using WP Engine or Flywheel as your hosting company. If you are, then you have a nice connection to make things even easier, but I'm going to assume that isn't the case and you're using your own hosting, something like Hostinger, SiteGround, anything like that. So come back, we can jump over into our blueprints. So when we create our blueprints, and like I say, a blueprint is just a collection of plugins, themes, and settings that you have all set up, ready to be able to spin up a copy of a new website and start building with everything in place. A little bit quicker work process, and you can create multiple blueprints. If you'd like a video on blueprints, let me know in the comment section below. I'll show you how you can set everything up inside Local to work with blueprints.
For now, though, let's move on. Next up, you've got some add-ons. So these are add-ons you can install into Local to expand the functionality you have. So things like Image Optimizer, which could be quite useful if you want to optimize your images on your computer to save those resources before you upload it to your final website. But there's other things inside here like cloud backups, link checkers, notes, and so on. Install what you think is useful for you. Then you've got your help docs, so if you want more help or you want to ask the community, you can do that from here. And finally, if you take a look at the bottom, you've got more from WP Engine. You can see there's the other plugins and tools that they supply. For this example, we don't want to worry about that.
Managing a Site in Local's Dashboard
So coming out of there, let's go back into our local sites. And then we've got this main panel here, and this is going to show us the site that we currently have selected from our local sites panel that you can see running here. We only have one, but all the information as you create more will be listed to you. So we've got the overview, the database, and the tools. This will tell us the domain, the SSL certificate, what version of the server we're using, what PHP version, and so on. One thing I would recommend that makes life easy is to enable this one-click admin and then choose the admin username you want to use that's associated with this site. That just means when you click the WP Admin button, it will immediately take you to the admin already logged in, so you don't have to log in. Just a little step that makes life quicker.
Tells you then your version of WordPress, multisite, and so on. If you want to use Xdebug, you can do that. You can enable it here. Jump over to the database, this will show you information about your database and if you want to, you can open up the Adminer to allow you to kind of work on your database itself. Finally, you've got your tools, which allows you to use Mailpit for handling emails if you want to test those things out and your Live Links if you want to use this to actually share live links so people can see this outside of Local actually on the internet. Great if you're working with clients. Again, if you'd like to see a video on how to use this functionality, let me know in the comment section below.
Okay, so there's the basics. We can also go to the site folder, which will open up the folder on our local machine with all of our site files. You can see there's our test site. Pretty useful if you want to see what's going on, change files, upload things directly, you know, all manner of things. And if you want to, you can open the site shell, probably a little bit beyond what we want to cover in this video. Then we've got the WP Admin and we've got the Open Site. Both of them do what you'd expect them to do. WP Admin with the one-click admin logs us straight in, pretty simple and pretty useful. Clicking open site will take us over to the actual site itself, again, pretty simple and pretty easy to work with.
Now you'll also notice at the bottom we've got this pull and push. You can only use these tools if you're using WP Engine or Flywheel as your hosting account. These are not something you can use as any kind of hosting that you want to use, so just bear that in mind. And also, you'll notice the live link. Like I say, if you want to learn about that, let me know in the comments. Finally, we can choose to start or stop any site. So if we click stop site, this individual site will stop and then we can just open up another one and spin that up and start that up. And if we want, we can just start the site again. So this just turns the site on and off, that's really all it does. And if you've got multiple sites running, you can stop all of them from here. Finally, if you want to add a new site, you can click the add new local site and you'll go through that same process that we've just seen.
Preparing the Local Site for Migration with WPvivid
Okay, so our site is all set up using Local. We've gone through the process of building everything and everything is in place in exactly the same way as you would with a normal WordPress copy on any kind of server. Now we're ready to migrate this over to the live site. How can we do it? Well, again, we're going to use a totally free tool to do this, and there's multiple tools you can use, but I'm going to use the one that I like the most, which is WPvivid. So first of all, let's take a look at the site. This is our site all ready to go. We've finished working on it and everything is in place. So this is the site that we have on our hosting account. It's just a blank site ready for our new, fully finished website. So how do we go about actually migrating things over?
It's very simple. The first thing we need to do is install a plugin. So we're going to come into our site that is finished and ready to go. This is the one on Local. Going to come into our plugins and add a new plugin. And from there, we're going to search for WPvivid. Just install and activate that free plugin, and we now have everything in place on our finished site on Local to migrate over.
Generating a Migration Key on the Live Site
There's one more step before we start the process, though. We need to go onto our blank site on our hosting plan and we need to install the same plugin on there as well. So let's do that now. So there we go, I've already done the same thing, found it, installed it, and activated it. Now, if we come into WPvivid Backup, you'll see there's an option here that says Key. We need this. This is a very important part. We're going to click on this. We're going to set the key expiry time for two hours because we want to make the migration process right now and not have any kind of security issues moving forward. Click on generate and it'll give us this unique key. All we need to do is select it and copy it. And now we can use that on our site on Local to migrate over. It'll create the connection between our local site and our live domain, ready to transition everything over. Hope that makes sense.
Executing the Site Migration from Localhost
So, back into our local site, back into WPvivid. What we're going to do is we're going to come into the Auto Migration option. We're simply going to paste that key that we've just got. So we'll just paste that. There's our key. We'll click save. And you see that now tells us it's going to migrate from our local site, which is on our local machine, over to our domain, which in this example is just a temporary domain setup on some hosting. So that's all ready. We can then choose we want to transfer the database and the files, so basically everything from our site. We're going to click on Clone then Transfer. Now, this may take a couple of minutes depending upon how complex and how big your site is, but you can see this will give you a progress bar, and this will then create a copy of the site, then send that over to your blank site ready to complete the migration process. So we'll let that complete and then we'll move on. And there we go, one backup task is finished. So this is the first of the two stages. We've got a clone of this, it's been sent over to our hosting. Now we just need to restore that.
Restoring the Backup on the Live Server
So let's switch over to our live domain, come over into our Backup and Restore. And all we need to do now is choose the option that says Scan uploaded backup for received files. We'll click, and there's our file that's been transitioned over from our local machine. All we have to do is click Restore. We'll click the Restore button and that will give us a confirmation and then go through the process of restoring all of this, but on our new domain, ready for our site to be pushed live. And there we go, after about 30 seconds, our site has been completed. We've been logged out because obviously, we're going to have new login credentials. We can log in with the details, but let's take a quick look at the site to see that everything is up and running. And there we go, you can see if we take a look at the domain at the top, this is the new domain that we've just set up, so this is live on the internet. And as you can see, everything is in place. Our site has been transitioned over, all our content has been transitioned over, different pages, everything is set up ready to go.
Conclusion and Next Steps
So we've seen how easy it is to be able to set up our computer using Local to be able to build our websites, and then how we can use a free plugin to push everything over to our live site, ready to start actually promoting our website. Now, if you want to find out more about working with WPvivid and all the things they can do, check out this video next.
