"Incomplete" Hosted to Local Migration using WP Migrate Lite

Support
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Bug Summary

Migrated sites are missing styling (as if the theme’s CSS is missing) & site navigation is broken (clicking a page link returns a vanilla “Not Found | The requested URL was not found on this server” page).

However, once you login via /wp-admin, the whole site magically works properly.

Clue: when adding /wp-admin to my site’s URL, the browser automatically adds a random port for some reason (e.g., mysite.local/wp-admin plus carriage return becomes https://mysite.local:10019/wp-admin/) and the browser throws a “ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR” even after fixing the SSL Trust issue per SSL Certificate on macOS - Local.

If you delete the port and try again, you are taken to the admin login screen. At this point, styling is still broken, but once you login, voilà… all is well. The port was different from site-to-site, so it didn’t feel like a Local config issue (I don’t see how to specify a port in the Local macOS app).

Steps to reproduce

Imported 4 different WP sites from a AWS Lightsail host to Local using these steps: Import a WordPress Site to Local. I exported everything… inc. plugins and core files… for each site.

All 4 sites behaved the same way and all 4 fixed themselves once I logged in. The behavior was the same on Chrome and Firefox… broken styling and nav, then fixed after logging in.

For one site, I tried exporting everything EXCEPT core files (I read this Post Using WP Migrate Lite and importing to Local, no themes or media are migrated - #6 by mike1127 and it sounded similar, so I tried no core files), but it was the same behavior

Environment Info

Local System Details

  • Local version: 9.1.1+6738

  • Local instance Web server: Apache

  • Local instance PHP version: 8.0.30

  • Local instance Database: MySQL 8.0.16

  • Operating System (OS) and OS version: macOS 15.1.1 (24B91)

  • Browser and Browser version: Chrome 131.0.6778.86

Remote Host System Details

  • Apache Version: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)

  • PHP Version: PHP 8.3.13 (cli)

  • Dbase Version: mysql Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.11.8-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64)

  • Operating System (OS) and OS version: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS (Release: 24.04 | noble)

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Hi @davidafuller01

If things look normal when you’re in the Admin dashboard that indicates a caching issue since your admin activity is automatically uncached. You might have a plugin or theme that has cache that needs flushed, or they might have a Regenerate CSS option. Some common ones are here:

The Flywheel guide to clearing your theme/plugin cache

You might have some browser cache in the way as well, and if you’re noticing broken assets like images you might have mixed content issues. Even though you’re not using Live Links these troubleshooting tips could help further as well:

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Makes sense. I adopted Local as part of an effort to migrate all my hosted WP instances to static AWS S3 hosted sites (using Simply Static). As part of this work, I’m busy removing all the Jetpack plugins and any other perf / caching related plugins.

Thanks for the quick reply. Hopefully this Post is useful for others that may come after me.

1 Like
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Sounds great @davidafuller01! If you have any other questions or concerns don’t hesitate to reach back out. We are always happy to help!