 One of my most used tools for building WordPress websites has to be my local host. This is how I build, test, play around and have fun with WordPress websites without having to use my hosting, take up any server resources or cause any extra hosting expenses. And my go-to local host is going to be local by Flywell. Now I feel this is perfect for WordPress beginners, which is why I wanted to share this. It is super easy to set up, it's very straightforward to use, and there are no hidden costs like it's absolutely free. It is a great way to get started building WordPress websites directly on your computer. So let's go ahead and set this up. I'm going to show you how to do this. To get started, go to localwp.com. I've left a link inside the description. And then from here you can click on any other download buttons, they all do the same. And just choose what platform you're going to use. I'm going to be doing this on my Mac, but I've done it on Windows and it works just the same. Now after you choose it, you got to put in your details right here. Everything is free, but you do got to sign up. That's the only caveat to using this, but there are no costs for anything. So I'm going to put in my details. After that you'll be able to download. So now I got my app installed right here. I'm just going to go ahead and launch it and get it set up. Then from here, just follow the setup wizard like you would do with any new app. Now from here, they're giving you an option to create an account. Now you don't have to do this. I personally have though, and that is because our other features to this local host that I found was very helpful to have an account for. But for now just leave it as it is. You don't need an account or anything. So you go ahead and either put on reporting or not. I'm just going to click on no thanks for right now. And now we are ready to create our first site. So from here I'm just going to click on create a new site. Now there are other options like we got this option for a blueprint or to upload an existing zip. I'm going to keep this very simple. This is for just getting started. After you've started using this, then you could feel free to test out and learn more about this tool. But I'm just going to show what is needed to get started. So from right here, I'm going to leave on create a new site. Click on get started. I'm going to call this new site, call yours whatever you like. Again, there's more options, but right now everything is good to go just as it is. I'm going to select on continue. I'm going to leave it on preferred. Now custom is a bit more advanced. And again, once you start building a website and if you already are an experienced web developer, you would use this option right here. But for most of us and most of you out there preferred is good enough to get started. So let's go on continue. And then from here, you're going to put in your log and credentials. So put in your username, your password, and then your WordPress email. And once you got your login details set up, go ahead and click on add site. And now a new WordPress website is being loaded and set up. And now our website is good to go. So right here, you can click on open site and see just the site. But to log in in the back end, let's click on WP admin, use our login details. And there we go. Our WordPress website is now ready to get started. We can start building it. You can add in elements or your hello theme and build out your website. This is the most simplest and straightforward way to get started on a local host. I've tried quite a few of them. And none of them I found as a newbie a beginner to web development was as easy and straightforward to use. Now going back over to our local host settings over here, there's quite a bit that we could do in here, but I just want to show the basics to get started. Now the first thing is I always like to turn on my one click admin. I like to turn this on, you can select your admin right here. And what this does is well, it allows you to just log in automatically without having to put in your login details. I found this is very helpful when I'm testing new sites, I'm playing around and creating a bunch of different installs because we got the site here, but I can start adding a lot more sites and usually this gets built up pretty quickly, I'll have a bunch of websites in here. The next one would be the PHP version. I do like to test out my websites with the latest PHP. Now just note that if you're using say older plugins, older themes that really haven't been updated through time, you might have to use an older version, sometimes something might break on a website. And this is something that I usually do test to see if it could run off the latest PHP version. Again, this is a bit more advanced right here. Another thing though that is very helpful is to go here to the site folder. And you could go right here into the app to the public and you could see all your WordPress files. So you know, sometimes we've got to use FTP to get into our WordPress files. Say we got to do some debugging, something happens. Well we could just access it right here in our website quite easily, I find that very helpful. All right, there's just one more thing I want to show you I feel this is really helpful when you are getting started and this is going to be the add-ons. There is one add-on I would always enable and that is going to be the notes. And I like to install this add-on because look at once I start building a lot of websites, I'm sometimes just building them to test or have fun trying out a theme or a plugin, maybe testing an update. Well this starts to build up and by adding notes to each one of these installs will help to organize them. So there's a lot more, you know, we got this Kinect, we got the Blueprint, you got a lot more add-ons over here. Also you do have this live link here where you could turn on and create a link for your site temporarily. I found it to be a bit finicky like it works sometimes. I don't really use it that often, it could help out but really what this is really useful for is just creating brand new WordPress websites really quickly like here's another website. I could just go ahead and add in my login details and just like that we got a new website set up super fast and easy took less than a minute to get this going and there it is. That is what I use for building my WordPress websites. This tool is super useful for many, many situations. These are great for when you are building new websites because everything just goes so much faster on a local host compared to an actual hosted website. Also they're great for testing things out, testing updates, especially big updates like inside Elementor who commerce something like that. Also these are great for just having fun and geeking out, trying out new things and having fun with WordPress is great for beginners that are just learning, practicing. This way you can just practice on your own computer and you don't have to worry about hosting and all that and just have fun with it. Now it's important to understand what a local host is and how a local host is different from regular hosting. A local host is basically installing a server onto your computer, turning your computer into your own personal hosting that could run WordPress websites. Now a local host is not going to have your websites showing online that you need a regular hosting for. But what you could do is and what I do is I build the websites on my local host and then I migrate it to a live host, which I am going to show inside my next video. I'm going to show you how I migrate from local host to live hosting and vice versa. Also make sure to do that good YouTube stuff like subscribe, that way you can get notified when that video comes out, it will be about a week from now. And if it's already out, well I'll leave a link for it somewhere up here or down inside the description so that way you can check it out because it's going to be a very good companion video to this one. Well I hope this video helps out and if you've got questions as always drop them inside the comments and I'll be back again soon with more WordPress and web design related content. All right, thank you for watching.