One of the biggest challenges WordPress developers face is ensuring their themes and plugins work across different WordPress and PHP versions. Since we launched Studio, our free and open source local development app, last year, you’ve asked for more flexibility in version selection—and now you have it.

As of today, WordPress and PHP version selection is now available in Studio, giving you even more control over your local development environment and testing processes.

How to Select WordPress and PHP Versions in Studio

With this update, you can now select your preferred WordPress and PHP versions at two key moments:

• When creating a new site: Previously, you had to create a site with default settings and change versions later. Now you can select the exact versions you need when you create a Studio site.
• For existing sites: Do you need to test your site against an older WordPress version or with a different PHP environment? Go to your Studio site settings to select your preferred versions.

Expanded Version Support

Local sites built with Studio now support:

• WordPress versions: 5.9 and up (including beta versions).
• PHP versions: 7.4 through 8.4.

This range of support lets you test your projects in environments that match your production requirements or validate compatibility across different versions. You may want to use it for:

• Plugin and theme testing: Ensure your code works across multiple WordPress environments.
• Legacy support: Work on sites that aren’t yet ready for the latest WordPress or PHP versions.
• Backward compatibility: Test your work against older versions for broader user support.
• Early adoption: Test beta versions of WordPress and prepare for upcoming releases.

The new version selection feature is available today for all Studio users on Studio 1.3.8 or higher.

What’s Next for Studio

At WordPress.com, we’re constantly fielding your feedback and iterating to make Studio the best local development environment for WordPress sites. Version selection is just one of many features we’re adding based on your needs and feedback.

Have more feedback to share with us? Open up an issue in GitHub.

Download Studio today to start developing locally, and subscribe to our developer newsletter, Dev & Deploy, to stay in the loop on all-things Studio.