WordPress Playground has stopped being a proof of concept. With my.WordPress.net live, the core team is showing that WASM environments can hold a real site and not just a throwaway plugin preview. Your browser is the server now, not a window onto one.
I have been building on this platform since the 4.x days and I have watched plenty of “revolutionary” tools come and go. A persistent browser instance running on WordPress Playground is a different animal. For private, local-first apps it takes database management and hosting config out of the picture completely.
How WordPress Playground powers private workspaces
my.WordPress.net keeps your site alive between sessions using browser storage such as IndexedDB. There is no MySQL server sitting on a Linux box in a data center. Your data lives in a virtual SQLite database inside the browser, which makes the site private by construction and unreachable from the public internet.
That fits what I call “Utility WordPress”: the CMS as a personal tool rather than a public portal. A personal CRM, a private RSS reader, that sort of thing. Configuration comes from Blueprints. If you read my earlier take on why 2025 changed local development, this is the same argument with persistence added.
The blueprint strategy for browser apps
The gotcha for developers is how these “apps” get bundled. A Blueprint is not a plugin, it is a whole preconfigured environment described in JSON. So rather than clicking through wp-admin to set a site up, you ship the Blueprint and let it do that.
A minimal WordPress Playground Blueprint for a private workspace looks like this:
{
"$schema": "https://playground.wordpress.net/blueprint-schema.json",
"preferredVersions": {
"php": "8.3",
"wp": "latest"
},
"steps": [
{
"step": "installPlugin",
"pluginZipFile": {
"resource": "wordpress.org/plugins/friends"
}
},
{
"step": "setSiteOptions",
"options": {
"blogname": "My Private Workspace",
"blogdescription": "Powered by WASM"
}
}
]
}That JSON tells the browser to pull the latest core, install the Friends plugin and set the site options, all in memory. Next to standing up a staging site it saves real time, which is why I tell clients to stop wasting time on traditional staging for small UI tweaks.
Digital sovereignty vs. managed hosting
Most free tools online charge you in data. my.WordPress.net runs locally, so your contacts, drafts and research never leave your machine. That is the digital sovereignty part. The catch is the flip side of the same design: clear the browser cache without a backup and the “permanent” site is gone, so export a .zip backup regularly.
If Playground work is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Start experimenting with my.WordPress.net
The appeal is that you can break things without consequences. Learning PHP or roughing out your next project, WordPress Playground asks nothing of you up front. It is the five-minute install rewritten for people who expect software to load instantly. The site is at my.WordPress.net, and the official Playground documentation covers building your own apps.
