Errors when importing sample content

We provide sample content and widgets along with our themes to help you get started on your site. In each theme’s documentation, we have information on how to import sample content and widgets using purpose-built plugins.

These operations are not without problems, below try to troubleshoot the most common occurrences.

Errors when importing sample content

Some common issues are:

• Timeout warning: The WordPress importer will stop and it will provide you with an error stating that maximum script execution time was exceeded.
• Out of memory error: most of the time when this error occurs you won’t get a notification, the importer progress screen will go gray and nothing will appear to be happening.
• insufficient permission errors: in this case, WordPress will inform you of its inability to create the necessary folders to store the sample images.

These three errors regard the WordPress Importer plugin and need to be dealt with in collaboration with your host provider.

The first error is caused by PHP’s script execution time set too low, most of the time this is set to 30 seconds, which works for most scripts, but importing sample content will take more than half a minute due to the size of data imported. Ask your host to increase script execution time.

The out of memory error is caused by PHP’s memory limit being set too low, the larger the amount of data the importer has to transfer, the larger the amount of server memory it needs. Ask your host to increase PHP’s memory limit.

Finally, if you get an insufficient permissions error, it means that WordPress can’t write in the /wp-content/uploads/ folder. Most common permission set for WordPress is 755 for folders and 644 for files, ask your host to check if the above is valid. More info about WordPress’s permission scheme here.

Errors when importing sample widgets

The errors you might encounter using the Widget Importer/Exporter plugin to import sample widgets are much simpler.
The most common error is the “site does not support widget” one. This means that the widget in question is provided by a plugin and the plugin has not been installed prior to the sample widget import attempt. This can be the case when importing sample widgets for a WooCommerce theme and haven’t installed WooCommerce, or when a theme has a social icons widget and the Socials Igniter plugin has not been installed etc.

Clarification regarding images on the provided sample content

When you successfully import the sample content of any of our themes you will get placeholder images with the wording “Sample Image” on them. This is not a problem/malfunction or error on the importing procedure. The images you see on the theme’s demo are protected under copyright and can’t be distributed along with the theme, so instead we provide the placeholder image.