Can someone please (!) help me with understanding how Local works?! I’ve only ever managed my single WP website, the same one for 6 years. It was hosted on Bluehost and about 6 months ago I moved it over to Flywheel, because I thought it would be more WP friendly, however I’m realizing it might be for very advanced designers and not someone like me.
I can’t get the answer to the most fundamental question - on videos or in the forum - so I’m feeling a little frustrated and deflated. 
I bought a new theme and would like to modify it “behind the scenese” before I switch it out for my active website. Is Local the way to do that? Do I upload the new theme to my WordPress site and then… ?? What?! I don’t want to push the current active theme off the internet.
See?! I don’t even have the terminology to explain where I’m at or in need of (!). Very new to this side of things. Any advice on how I load up my new theme, modify it behind the scenes but still see it as users will ultimately see it online, before the switcharoo, would be super appreciated.
Thank you soo much,
jm
Justine - If you haven’t already contacted Flywheel Support, I suggest you do that. They are incredibly helpful. And no, Flywheel Hosting is not reserved for the “advanced” designers. But, I must admit, dealing with seemingly many problems in “Local by Flywheel” is a different story. I would probably suggest, enabling Staging for your website, which you can do from your Flywheel Dashboard.
Log in, click on your site, and click STAGING. Then, scroll down and click the blue RESET STAGING button to make a copy of your live website hosted on Flywheel. You can then access your Staging site at http(s)://staging.yourwebsite.com and make all the changes you want to the Staging site while preserving your live site.
When you’ve finished with your theme modifications, you can move/copy only your theme files over to your live site. But really, help@getflywheel.com is superb.
Using a staging site like this is not usually as fast as using a local setup on your own computer since the Staging site still resides on a Flywheel server, but it’s easier for some people to use than “Local by Flywheel” and using a Staging site should have no issues, other than switching the WP Home URL to the staging address, and making sure your graphics links are not hard-coded to your live site’s URL or you will have to adjust them by adding “staging.” at the beginning. Good luck!
Thank you for replying Jeff. I think I got it. 