Troubleshooting the Localhost Environment for WordPress

Hosting a local development site is the best way to learn more about WordPress and make custom modification to your site. In this article, you’ll learn…

• Why is my local site slow?
• Local site cannot be reached in browser
• Cloud alternatives for WordPress

When you’re ready to take your local site online, WordPress hosting is the best option.

Why Is My Local Site So Slow?

Your localhost site should be very fast, because it skips the Internet entirely and loads the site directly from your computer. If your site is loading slowly then you must check the code of the site itself. For example, the WordPress theme is probably what’s causing the slowness. Check the theme to see if it is deferring JavaScript parsing. At the very least, contact the theme developer for assistance.

Site Cannot Be Found – Domain Can’t Be Reached

Remember your localhost is running off an internal web server. If you go to your local virtual host via a domain (for example, site.local) you may get an error in your browser that the domain cannot be reached. There are a few different causes of this error.

Make sure to launch your servers. Whether you’re using a self-installed LAMP stack or a proprietary program like MAMP or XAMP, you will need to make sure that the Apache or Nginx web server is running. If not, your browser will try to search the Internet for your local domain and pull up no results.

You may need to restart your server. Changes to the web server configuration require a restart. Making a modification like adding a virtual host (basically a new a site) counts heavily as a configuration change and will not take effect until the web server has restarted. Most local development environment will perform this restart automatically when you add a new host. If it’s still not working, you may want to try rebooting the computer.

Cloud Alternatives

If you decide that localhost development is too complicated, there are cloud-based solutions that can be helpful. One of the easiest and fastest ways to launch WordPress test environments is through a service like Cloud WordPress.

Cloud WordPress lets you launch as many WordPress test environments as you need and comes free with the premium version of BoldGrid.