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Do you do your design/testing/development on your production website? Have you ever installed or updated something that crashes a section or the entire site? Ever tried to format or fix your site layout while everyone visiting watches you?
Most people set up their WordPress sites with hosting providers like BlueHost, HostGator, GoDaddy and the big named hosting providers. This is definitely where you want to start and the most affordable solution for getting your site visible to the world. The problem is that most people just stop here. They do all their testing/design/configuration and prototyping directly on their production site and rely on it as a one-stop shop for getting everything done.
Now given you have a low traffic site where you are really not trying to commercialize it or take it to the next level, then the practice of doing everything on a single production server is probably okay. However if you establish good habits now, you will carry them forward to sites that really matter and are no longer just hobby sites.
When you begin to build up a decent list of subscribers where people are checking your site regularly and your name and brand is also associated with the reliability of your website, then you should approach every update to your site and database with much more caution and develop like the pros do.
Professional developers work in separate environments. They have two identical blogs on two separate computers. The first is a development environment and the second is a production environment which is usually their hosting provider. The development and production blogs are usually identical to each other except for one huge difference. The development server is only seen by the developer and internal to his/her company and the production server is what the rest of the world sees (usually your hosted server).
This is how the pros work and in this article you will learn how to set this environment up for yourself so you can take advantage of all the benefits a development/production environment offers you.
To have the same functionality that your hosting provider gives you when you set up your production website, you will need the same tools they use to make this happen. Those tools consist of a Web server, database engine, and a scripting language capable of performing complex application requests. Most hosting providers run on Linux operating systems and you will either have a PC or Mac. This scenario is fine, just make sure you’re using close to the same PHP version in both environments. You can easily find this out by pasting the code below into a file named phpinfo.php and then browsing to it, be sure remove to it from your production server when you’re done.
There are also WordPress plugins that will output this same info. Just do a search for phpinfo in the plugins directory.
The three big tools that hosting companies use include: Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The beauty of XAMPP is that it bundles all these applications and a few others into an easy to use control panel that allows you to run great applications like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and tons of other great open source and commercial products on your own machine.
Setting up and installing XAMPP is a simple and easy process. You can have your own WordPress up on your computer in under 15 min! Just follow these simple steps.
1. DOWNLOAD XAMPP
2. INSTALL XAMPP
Individuals who administrate there WordPress sites like professionals have the two-tiered system I mentioned above in the section “Develop like a pro.” The systems don’t have to be 100% in sync; however, they should be somewhat close. So, before you do any upgrades or play with a new plugin simply install it on your development site to make sure everything looks good and you have it configured just how you want and then perform the same action on your production site.
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