These plugins and tools will help smooth your local/staging WordPress development experience

  1. Creating staging environments: WP Staging
  2. Dumping the live database for importing/debugging: WP Migrate DB
  3. Exporting media files: WordPress can do that!
  4. Running WordPress development environments (these require Vagrant and/or Docker): Chassis, VVV, Trellis
  5. Bedrock, for a git-friendly project structure. Additionally, you get to use Composer for dependencies (plugin versions, WordPress version etc)

As always, security is important, beware of the security implications of duplicating sensitive live data.