I’ve read some posts about speeding up Local but nothing has helped really. My brand new fresh install is slower than if I were online. I’m running Mac 10.14.6 and the latest version of the app. It should be lightning fast since it’s offline, why is it not and are there any tricks to speed things up?
I would like to hear a response to this question from someone with greater understanding than I possess. But with my limited understanding, here’s what I can say.
My experience has been the same as yours. Development sites – whether on MAMP or Local – generally load more slowly than hosted sites. The Local 5 Beta feels faster than Local 3.X but both feel slower than my live sites.
I can think of a couple of explanations for this. First, the workstations we’re running our development sites on are not optimized as webservers. Second, our Internet connections have got much faster in the last few years, making hosted sites load more quickly than they used to.
So, what’s the advantage of a local development site? Well, file updates are easier. Any changes to PHP, CSS, and JS files you make locally are instantly recorded on your local SSD, whereas on a hosted site you’d have to go through FTP to get them up there. Second, whatever you’re doing on your local development site will be for your eyes alone. There’s no chance anyone is going to see it until you upload it and go live with it.
That said, I’ve thought about playing with a development site on a subdomain (e.g. “dev.mysite.com”), using a utility like Mountain Duck to mount the site folder as a drive on my computer and a maintenance mode plugin to block access to unauthorized visitors. I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe that’s an easier way to go, rather than trying to maintain a local development site.
As I said, I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic.
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When I would use MAMP and XAMP i remember the sites loading much faster than with Local but I see your point. Probably not as “optimized” as servers that are made specific for it on the internet.
I’ve been quite happy lately with the performance of Local Beta. Right at the moment, my development sites feel pretty zippy.
I’m running Local Beta in MacOS Mohave on a Skylake i7 system with 16GB and a Samsung 970 EVO. But any recent iMac, MacBook Pro, or Windows 10 PC will have similar specs.
If you’re getting annoyingly slow performance there’s probably something wrong. The first place to start checking is with your plugins. Disable all of them and then add them back one-by-one to see if there are noticeable performance hits.
If you’ve got a plugin that you can’t live without but is slowing your site, you can use a plugin like Plugin Organizer to selectively load that plugin only on pages that require it. Doing this would likely improve speed on your live sites as well.
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