searchengineland.com/google-starts-giving-ranking…
The article is a bit old, but Google and I'm sure Bing now also, favor SSL sites over non.
I prefer to develop on a live cloud server instead of locally - then I'm always an internet connection away from my work and it saves me against local hardware failure, but be it LetsEncrypt or a SSL certificate from GoDaddy or the like, it's really not terribly expensive for an SSL cert or a wild card SSL cert now a days.
With "most" sites now collecting at least "some" personal information - it's just better to be safe then sorry.