Currently, my local website has the extension, ‘.local’. Can I change the extension to ‘.com’ during development or after uploading to my hosting? If so, how? Thanks in advance.
You would change it when you push your site to a live server. How you change it depends on how/where you’re pushing the site.
If you’re using the deploy tool to Flywheel I think it happens automatically (I don’t use that myself).
If you’re deploying by other means, or elsewhere my favorite way is to use WP CLI (needs SSH access to the remote server, and for WP CLI to be installed).
You can also use a plugin like: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search-and-replace/
Or a server script like: https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
The one thing to keep in mind is that much of the WordPress database is serialized data. The tools above all take that into account. If you do something very old school like doing a simple text search and replace on an .sql dump file it will fail and cause problems.
Thanks for the prompt reply. I’ve done this process before using backupbuddy but haven’t done it before using LocalByFlywheel. I though there was a ‘different process’ using LocalByFlywheel. What I needed help with is it better to allow LocalByFlyWheel to change the domain suffix to ‘.com’ then migrate to my live host. I use BackupBuddy but I was told that ‘All-in-One WP Migration’ was much easier. Also my concern was if I migrate using the current domain suffix, ‘local’, I would need to find and change links to the .com domain suffix. Is there a plugin that would make that change easier?
Hey @sepia,
Like @jb510 mentioned above, you can use a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/search-and-replace/ in order to make this switch from .local to .com after you’ve moved the site to your live host. That’ll comb through the site’s database and update any .local references it finds (which does include most, if not all links) to a .com 
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