Hello,
I am trying to import a website to Local but it is just unsuccessfull. I’ve got a message saying “please try again with a compatible zip file”.
Please could you check and tell me if something is missing in the screenshot attached?
Thanks
Security Reminder
Local does a pretty good job of scrubbing private info from the logs and the errors it produces, however there’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 isn’t private info like passwords being displayed.
The site comes from my live hosting. I wanted to work on it locally instead of putting it in maintenance mode
The sql is not already in the wp-content then?
Sometimes there can be extra files in a site export that can confuse Local during the import process. As a baseline what it needs to get a site going are the WP-Content and SQL directories so sometimes reducing your import file down to just those two items can help it to go through. Another thing you could do is use the free plugin WP Migrate Lite to create a new export of your hosted site that only includes these files.
I’m not certain without looking at their documentation. How large is this site? Generally speaking with manual imports it shouldn’t be too much of a concern although it can sometimes take awhile for things to get exported/imported.
In the sceenshot above I can’t see the Database. Can you see the database?
My website is hosted in hostinger. I used Filezilla to import the files locally.
Why would we just use plugins while we could just download the files from the host interface?
I was just recommending the plugin as a potential workaround to get a full site export with everything you need together. I’ve never used Hostinger myself, but looking at their documentation it looks like you have the option to download the site files and database separately or together. You could try the latter method to ensure everything you need is included to be able to have a complete import for Local.
If you’re pulling all the files manually via FTP, then you could manually import them into Local with some extra steps like this:
Create a new, blank site in Local. Use whatever username/password you like since you’ll overwrite the DB with this site archive’s dump.
Copy the wp-content folder from the unzipped location to this newly created site’s location
Copy the correct SQL dump to the site root. If you still don’t have the SQL, you could use the documentation from Hostinger above to just download the DB.
Within Local, open the site shell
Import the dump with wp db import <dumpfile>
If that works, now Search and replace the domains. wp search-replace ' https://production.com ' 'http:mylocalsite.local'
No, in the manual steps you would be importing into the blank site manually, replacing the automatically generated files. Again this is just another workaround if you’re not able to get a zip export working for the direct import.
