I once spent three hours setting up a staging environment just to show a client why a specific plugin was breaking their checkout. By the time I had the SSH keys sorted and the DB migrated, the client had already moved the meeting. Total nightmare. I thought I could just use a local Docker setup, but explaining how to view that to a non-tech client is a losing battle. I needed a better WordPress Playground workflow, but back then, it just wasn’t ready.
To be honest, I dismissed Playground early on. I thought it was just a browser toy for “light” testing. I tried running a heavy migration on it about a year or so ago, and the thing just choked. I assumed it was another half-baked experiment that wouldn’t survive the real world. So, I stuck to my slow, “reliable” staging sites. Big mistake.
Why the WordPress Playground Workflow is Changing the Game
The 2025 Year in Review for Playground, which you can check out on the official Make WordPress core blog, shows just how wrong I was. We’re now at a point where 99% of the top 1,000 plugins install and activate without a hitch. That’s huge. It means the “it works on my machine” excuse is finally dying a well-deserved death.
But the real kicker for me? It’s not just about WordPress anymore. The platform is now powerful enough to run PHPMyAdmin, Composer, and even Laravel. Think about that for a second. You can pull in dependencies and manage a database entirely within a browser tab. No local server, no MAMP, no Docker overhead. Just clean, disposable testing environments that you can share with a URL.
If you’re still doing things the old way, you’re just burning billable hours. I’ve started using Blueprints to spin up pre-configured environments for every ticket. It saves me at least an hour of setup time every single day. Period.
{
"landingPage": "/wp-admin/",
"steps": [
{
"step": "installPlugin",
"pluginData": {
"resource": "wordpress.org/plugins/bbioon-custom-fix"
}
},
{
"step": "login",
"username": "admin",
"password": "password"
}
]
}It Is Time to Stop Fighting Your Environment
The lesson here is simple: the tools have caught up. Whether you’re debugging a race condition in a custom hook or just trying to see if a new theme breaks your CSS, there’s no excuse for a slow feedback loop. Playground has moved from a “cool experiment” to a foundational part of how we build and test at our agency.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you still manually migrating databases for every small test? Trust me on this—it’s time to move on.
It’s amazing how far WordPress Playground has come. The ability to run Composer and manage a database directly in the browser is a real time-saver. I think a lot of devs, myself included, have underestimated it, but the progress is undeniable.