Importing WordPress sites: Why won’t the Import tool finish?

Importing WordPress sites: Why won’t the Import tool finish?

Lately I have been consolidating WordPress sites into one single installation to simplify the management process but one of the issues I’ve come across is that the Export / Import tool won’t completely import an entire site. Sure, as a site grows the work of moving over all the media and posts becomes daunting. Well, it so happens that unless you have a super fast host and db connection your WordPress worker process (or however you want to call it / it is called) times out. I had a site even with dedicated db and web host it took over 30 minutes to process the import. So, if you think of it that way then it only makes sense that the solution follows one of the two options:

1. Break up your exported XML so that WordPress imports only a few things at a time.
2. Increase the timeouts of your php.ini so that WordPress may continue to work on importing for a long time.

For most users option 1 is the one and only option. Why? Because they are tied up to a web host provider that won’t allow them to tune their php settings. This only makes sense, you are sharing a server with probably hundreds if not more of users and having a job run for say an hour is going to have a significant impact on everyone’s site performance.