The importer finishes the main work by itself. This page is the review pass, plus the repairs for the handful of things a server, a cache or a third-party plugin can leave half done.
#Look at the result first
Walk the site before changing anything:
The front page renders the way the demo did
Menus appear in the right places
Widget areas are populated, where the theme has them
Images load throughout the media library
The theme settings included in your import took effect
If all of that is right, skip to the last section and start replacing the demo content with yours.
If several of them are wrong at once, the import itself did not finish, and the repairs below will not help. That has its own page.
#Pages return 404
A common one, and quick to fix.
Open SettingsPermalinks and press Save Changes without changing anything. That rewrites the rules WordPress uses to resolve URLs, which is all the imported pages were waiting for.
The same fix works outside demo imports. Any time content exists in the admin and returns 404 on the front end, re-save the permalink rules first.
#Images are the wrong size
Regenerating thumbnails is the repair.
WordPress does not resize an image when it displays it. It cuts a set of fixed sizes at upload time, and a theme asks for the size it wants by name. A demo import brings in the image files, but the size a theme wants may not exist yet, so WordPress falls back to whatever it has: an original that is too big, or a crop shaped for a different layout.
Regenerating re-cuts every registered size from the original file. Any of the plugins built for it will do this, and it can take a while on a large media library.
Run it only when images are visibly wrong.
Most imports never need it, so it is not part of the checklist.
#The layout looks stale
Caches are usually behind this. Clear them in this order.
The page cache and the CDN. Clear both before concluding anything is wrong. A cached copy of the pre-import site explains a surprising number of reports.
The theme's generated styles. The import clears them when it writes theme settings. If styles still look old, open Preferences in the theme dashboard and, in the Advanced section, press Rebuild now next to Rebuild styles.
Your page builder, if you use one. A builder keeps its own generated CSS and its own data cache, which the import did not touch. Elementor, for example, has a regenerate-CSS action and a cache clear on its tools screen, and other builders have an equivalent in their own settings. If your pages were not built with one, skip this.
#When the server ran out of resources
A run that stops partway, media that half arrives, or a screen that goes blank during the import usually mean the same thing: the site ran out of memory, execution time or upload size.
A demo import needs higher limits than a WordPress site needs for everyday traffic, which is why a host that has been fine for months can still fail an import. Check the values against the requirements before running anything again.
#Replace the demo content
This last step decides whether your site looks like your site.
A live site with a demo phone number is a worse outcome than one with unfinished styling.
Demo text, images, contact details and links are all placeholders. The contact details and links are the ones that can cost you something, so go through them before the site is public.
#Common questions
Can I delete the demo posts I do not need?
Yes. They are ordinary posts, and deleting them affects neither the theme nor its settings.
Some images did not import
The media download most likely hit a timeout. Run the import again with only the media type selected: the importer skips what it already has and fetches the rest.
The homepage is not the one from the demo
Check SettingsReading. The front page assignment travels with the Site settings part of the import, so it was not imported if that part was left out.
Do I need to keep the demo pages I am not using?
No, though look at them before deleting. They are the fastest way to see what the theme's layouts can do.
Is it safe to run the import again?
Yes. The importer skips what it already brought in, so a second run fills the gaps rather than duplicating the site. It is the normal fix for an import that stopped halfway.
Something is still wrong after all of this
Note whether the problem is content, layout or settings, because each leads somewhere different. Missing content means the import did not finish and should be run again. A broken layout is usually a cache or a missing integration. Missing settings mean that data type was never selected.
Bring that one sentence, your PHP version and your memory limit when you ask for help.
#Still stuck
Open a support ticket and say what you tried and where it stopped. Your product, your domain, a screenshot and the exact message you saw are usually enough to settle it in one reply.
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