DevKinsta is the ultimate local development toolkit for all things WordPress. Whether you’re working on a website design, developing a plugin, or crafting a theme, DevKinsta offers some exceptional features that you can’t find in other local devkit tools.

It’s so much easier to install and setup. And it has everything a developer would need to build and test WordPress websites locally. One of its best features is the ability to deploy your websites directly to Kinsta hosting after development.

Today, we take a closer look at DevKinsta to tell you why you should use this local development suite for all your WordPress creations.

What Is DevKinsta?

DevKinsta is a local WordPress development toolkit brought to you by Kinsta, one of the leading web hosting providers in the world. Kinsta has developed DevKinsta as a completely free tool for WordPress developers.

DevKinsta comes bundled with all the tools you need to build and develop all kinds of WordPress websites, themes, and plugins in a local environment. And it’s very easy to setup as well. DevKinsta is available for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu platforms.

But why would you want to use this toolkit? Let’s find out.

Why Use It?

If you’re unfamiliar, a local WordPress development toolkit allows you to install WordPress on your computer. Or in other words, in a local development environment. This lets you build and test your website before releasing it to the public.

Developers use local WordPress installations to build plugins, designers use them to craft themes, and freelancers use them to build websites for clients. Even if you’re planning to make your first WordPress website, using a local WordPress installation is a great way to test your themes and plugins before launching the website.

DevKinsta offers many different tools to facilitate all these functions and more. (Plus, it supports ten languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Danish!)

Free and Beginner-Friendly

DevKinsta is completely free to download and use. Sure, there are other local WordPress devkits available but DevKinsta is the only suite we’ve seen to have a sleek, modern, and very beginner-friendly design.

The user interface of DevKinsta is much easier to understand and get around. Even someone who’s completely new to WordPress could use it to make and test websites.

One-Click WordPress Install

When using most other local devkit tools, you have to manually install WordPress and sometimes have to configure the databases too.

DevKinsta makes that entire process a breeze with its one-click setup function. You can install WordPress and setup a starter site with just a single click. And the Nginx, PHP, and MySQL are automatically configured for you.

Develop and Deploy to Kinsta

Transferring your locally developed websites over to a live environment is the most painful part of local WordPress development. At least that’s how it is when using other tools.

However, when using DevKinsta, the process is much smoother. Once you finish developing your website, you can instantly deploy it to a live environment using a Kinsta hosting account.

Kinsta has 35 data centers located around the world with pricing plans to fit every budget, allowing you to easily bring your WordPress site online with just a few clicks.

Error Logging for Debugging Issues

Encountering bugs and issues when developing WordPress websites is a fairly common occurrence. Your site will function perfectly in a moment and then it will crash without any indication of an error.

Debugging these WordPress errors can be quite frustrating, especially when developing in a local environment. Thankfully, DevKinsta has a built-in WordPress error logging system that will help you identify these errors and issues more quickly and easily.

Built-In Database Management Tool

DevKinsta has a built-in database manager powered by Adminer. It makes things much simpler, even for beginners, to manage WordPress databases. Using this tool, you can edit database tables, perform SQL queries, and do much more.

Local Email Server

If you want to test email notifications for eCommerce websites, build contact forms, and test other tasks related to emails, DevKinsta has an email inbox made just for you.

This email inbox feature gets powered by MailHog email client and it will keep all outgoing emails for your various testing purposes.

Support for PHP 8+

Upgrading to newer versions of PHP is part of how WordPress keeps improving its functionalities. When developing websites, themes, and plugins, you should also take this into account.

DevKinsta allows you to easily test your WordPress creations using PHP 7.2 and up to 8.2. And you can switch between different versions of PHP with just one click.

Should You Use DevKinsta?

If you’re looking for a simpler and more convenient solution to build WordPress websites, themes, and plugins in a local environment, DevKinsta is the perfect toolkit for you.

It offers the right balance of features and functionality for everyone from experienced developers to freelancer designers and even website owners to build and develop WordPress sites. DevKinsta also has an offline mode so you don’t have to stay online all the time when developing.

Especially if you plan on using Kinsta (we also use Kinsta to host our site) to host your websites, DevKinsta will make the process of developing and deploying your websites an effortless task.

We encourage you to try DevKinsta and see the difference yourself. After all, it’s free!