The Starter Sites importer from Blocksy is a great tool that helps you get going to building your website with a beautiful pre-made template. This usually works in 99% of cases out there, but there are some setups that might derail from this rule. For that last percentile, depending on the error message that you get, there might be a solution for you.

How does the Starter Sites importer process work?

The importer has to make two requests in order to retrieve the list of Starter Sites.

1. Browser -> WordPress backend.
2. WordPress backend -> startersites.io¹

If one of these requests fails, the list of Starter Sites cannot be populated.

Errors

SSL errors

Having an SSL certificate installed for the website is very important, as it ensures that the communication between the two servers is secure and cannot be intercepted by anyone. Without a proper SSL certificate added to the site, importing Starter Sites is not possible as our own demo server uses SSL and does not accept connections from non-SSL websites.

It is required for any public website to have an SSL certificate installed and properly enforced in order to import demo content.

Footnotes

1. Startersites.io is the main domain from where the demo templates are downloaded.