Issues installing demo content for Avada

I had issues installing the demo content for the Avada theme.  Here is the error message.

Sorry but your import failed. Most likely, it cannot work with your webhost. You will have to ask your webhost to increase your PHP max_execution_time (or any other webserver timeout to at least 300 secs) and memory_limit (to at least 196M) temporarily.

The website I was trying was hosted on a free service plan on Azure.  I tried on a web hosting plan on Media Temple and it installed without issue.  But, I wanted to try to get it to work on both.

So, I did a number of troubleshooting steps:

• I researched how to increase the two PHP settings.  I found this article that explained how to configure the settings.  Since these are system settings, I had to do the settings.ini option.
• I found an article that suggesting using the WordPress phpinfo() plugin to see the status of PHP configuration.
• I restarted the Azure web app and tried again.
• That didn’t work but in more research I found out that every time you try to import the demo content, it might create duplicate content.  I was told to try the WordPress Reset plugin to reset the content in the database.
  • Here is the research – http://theme-fusion.com/knowledgebase/remove-duplicate-demo-content-import/
• The next thing I tried was to temporarily increase the web server spec on Azure.  I picked a service with more cores and ram.  I restarted and tried again.  Same error.
• I did more research and found these articles:
  • https://theme-fusion.com/knowledgebase/what-to-do-if-xml-import-fails/
  • https://theme-fusion.com/documentation/avada/demos/importing-avada-demos/
• One article above talked about using the Tools –> Import command.  I tried that options on both the Avada file and an export of the content from the working Media Temple website.

After many hours of trying things, the last thing I tried was thinking I might be able to backup the database from the Media Temple account and restore to Azure.  I starting research on ClearDB website’s for info on connecting.  I downloaded a tool but couldn’t get the connection to work.  So, I gave up for the night.

My plan was to just reset everything and give up trying to import the demo content on Azure.  I would setup another domain on Media Temple for testing.