Import Wordpress sites into Local

Support
,
1

I have Wordpress sites already hosted by C-Panel hosting services already running but wish to import them as a local back-up in Local. How can I accomplish the following:

  1. How can I export or create a back-up of my Wordpress site in my C-Panel hosting service
  2. How can I import this Wordpress site back-up into Local to create a local replica of my website?

Thank you!

System Details

  • Local Version: 9.2.5+6810

  • Operating System (OS) and OS version: Mac OS Sequoia 15.6.1

Local Logs

Attach your Local Logs here (Help Doc - Retrieving Localā€™s Log)

Security Reminder
Local does a pretty good job of scrubbing private info from the logs and the errors it produces, however thereā€™s always the possibility that something private can come through. Because these are public forums, always review the screenshots you are sharing to make sure there isnā€™t private info like passwords being displayed.

2

Thanks for your questions, @JRC!

  1. Create an export of your site using a plugin such as WP Migrate.
  2. Import the site into Local by dragging the exported zip into the running Local window.

Hereā€™s a guide showing how to do both with WP Migrate:

More on import options here:

3

Hi nickc,

Before I start with my question I wish to share how impressed I have been with Local as a local development platform for Wordpress and with your customer support. Every time I have had a question about Local and posted it here, I was surprised with a quick and very detailed answer from you that fully addressed my question or concern. Thank you very much for your help.

As for my question, I am experiencing a problem and it may well be related to my hosting service. I have downloaded and installed WP Migrate as you recommended. I tried to run it and produce Wordpress back-ups for three Wordpress sites I have with GoDaddy but all three failed. One returned the following message:

Migration Failed
The Export Migration failed during the migration initialization stage.
The string did not match the expected pattern.

The other returned the following message:

Migration Failed
The Export migration failed during the migration initialization stage.
Internal Server Error.

Are you able to identify the error and how to fix it? If not, do you know another plugin or back-up protocol that can produce a back-up in a format that can be imported by Local?

Thank you again for your help, nickc.

4

Thanks for the kind words, @JRC, weā€™re happy to help!

The errors sound specific to your hosting environment or sites. You could try editing your wp-config.php to replace this line:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

With these lines:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true ); 
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true ); 
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );

Then run the import again and check the file in your WordPress install at wp-content/debug.log, which can reveal errors that arenā€™t normally available on the plugin screen.

If this is a production site, donā€™t forget to change the ā€˜defineā€™ lines back to their original state after saving your debug.log files.

5

nickc,

Thank you again for your response and for your help. I have tried to follow your instructions but wasnā€™t able to resolve the problem. I am not an IT professional and my knowledge of Wordpress is limited. Would you be able to help me export my sites so I can import them into Local? It goes without saying that I would be happy to pay your fee for performing this service. Please let me know and how we can contact by e-mail outside of this forum.

Thank you again.

6

Sorry to hear that, @JRC. We donā€™t offer paid consulting, but you could try making a zip file manually from your siteā€™s database and wp-content folder:

  1. Download your siteā€™s wp-content folder (from a site backup or using SFTP).
  2. Export your siteā€™s database (your C-Panel hosting may offer this feature, or look for PhpMyAdmin and use the export option there).
  3. Compress the wp-content folder and the exported database SQL file together into a zip file on your computer.
  4. Drag that zip file into Local.

On macOS it looks like this, but Windows is similar:

Collect the wp-content and SQL file
Collect the wp-content and SQL file860Ɨ378 23.9 KB

Compress both into a zip file
Compress both into a zip file892Ɨ556 77.5 KB

Import the zip into Local

7

Hi nickc and thank you again for your very helpful response.

I have one questions before I proceed. I was able to produce one debug log and it showed the message PHP deprecated on numerous lines. I noticed that the version of PHP being used on my hosting panel is 7.4 but the most recent is 8.5. I tried to switch to a higher version which starts at 8.0 right after 7.4 and kept going up. However, whenever I change the version of PHP from 7.4 to any other version my sites stop working.

Could PHP be the reason I am unable to export my sites properly? In this case how can I upgrade my Wordpress sites so they become compatible with the more recent version of PHP?

Thank you again for your help.

8

Hi, @JRC, and thanks for the update.

Itā€™s possible that the ā€œInternal Server Errorā€ and ā€œstring did not matchā€ errors you saw during the WP Migrate exports are due to out-of-date themes or plugins, which could also affect your ability to upgrade to a newer PHP version.

I linked to some general guidance about how to safely update PHP below. You could follow the guide to update plugins and see if you have any that are not compatible with newer PHP versions.

If you can successfully update to a newer PHP version, you could then try running WP Migrate again.

9

Hi nickc,

Forgive me the long delay in providing a response but it took me a while to solve the problem. Since I donā€™t have advanced knowledge of Wordpress and you couldnā€™t help me with it, I contacted my hosting service (GoDaddy) and contracted their technical support specialists to do it. They upgraded the PHP, have all sites running on the latest PHP version (or one version before the latest) and the sites are running fine. After PHP was updated the problem remained as it was - the WP Migrate plugin still wouldnā€™t work. After working on the sites some more the specialist shared the problem was in the .htaccess file and he made some changes on it.

After these issues were resolved I was able to run the WP Migrate plugin, export all three Wordpress sites and import them into Local. The export process with WP Migrate and the subsequent import into Local couldnā€™t have been any easier. It worked exactly as you described and all three sites appear to be working just fine in Local.

I want to thank you one more time for you amazing support and for all the detailed instructions you shared so I could solve this problem.

1 Like
10

Thanks so much for your follow-up and feedback, @JRC ā€” really glad to hear you were able to resolve this and get everything working with Local.

If we can help with anything else, please let us know.

11

Hi agan nickc,

Actually I have one more question if you allow me. Itā€™s not entirely related to this post but still related to the same sites I am trying to build in Local.

After I started working on the sites I noticed one keeps asking me to ā€˜Try Againā€™ every time I try to save the site after I make some change. Let me be more specific.

I am editing the page contents using the option ā€˜Edit with Diviā€™. Once I make my change I go to the bottom of the page and click on the plus sign on the lower right hand corner to save the changes and a message appears:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 5.11.19 PM
Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 5.11.19 PM424Ɨ592 62.8 KB

This happens every single time I try to save changes to a page. Why is this happening? Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you.

12

Hi @JRC!

This is kind of a general error message that could have a lot of different culprits and might take some additional troubleshooting. Here are some resources you could start with:

As far as server resources, the Local defaults should be more than enough to run Divi on their own but if you are running other plugins itā€™s possible there could be a resource bottleneck so you could try boosting the memory limit. We have some instructions on how to do this at the bottom of our performance guide here: Troubleshoot: Performance Issues - Local

1 Like
13

Hi Nick-B,

I did exactly what you recommended and it solved the problem. Memory limit for the site was set to 256M. I changed it to 512M and it stopped display the error message.

Thank you Nick-B.

2 Likes
14

Thanks for letting us know @JRC! Iā€™ll go ahead and close this out for now but if you have any other questions or concerns donā€™t hesitate to reach back out. We are always happy to help!