It’s an awful feeling when you install a new plugin or theme and it breaks your site. All of your visitors are met by a site which is slow or doesn’t work at all. And your sales drop like a rock.

But you can avoid that tragic result if you use WP Simulator, Matt Garrett‘s new software for PC Windows XP, Vista, 7 & 8 – MAC OSX – Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard & Mavericks.

With this software, you can set up a WordPress server on your desktop machine that works just like WordPress on your hosting company’s server. Set it up to have the same themes and plugins as on your live site. Now you can test a change on this test server before you make the change on your live site.

There’s another advantage to building a copy of your live site on your desktop. If you keep it synced with your live site, and someone hacks that live site, you can use the copy on your desktop to restore the host. So, with WP Simulator, you can create a site, test it, clone it, back it up & fix your site by running WordPress on your PC/MAC.

You might wonder why you should invest in software to do it for you. Well, creating a localhost environment isn’t easy. To setup a test site correctly usually involves:
• Editing Apache and PHP config files,
• Creating MySQL databases,
• Editing WP config files &
• Running multi-step WordPress install procedure.

Even a computer whiz would need hours to do it all. But with WP Simulator. anyone can create this local copy of their main site with ease.

With this new solution (this is an updated version from the original release last year) you can back up as many as 12 WP sites to your local desktop so you can have the peace of mind that comes from knowing you have tested everything before going live.

You can get this solution to bad code, bad hosts and bad hackers here: WP Simulator.

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