The importer takes as long as it takes, and the reason you’re not seeing any progress is because it’s not designed to be used on a site that isn’t receiving visitors. You can start it up, watch it start, then walk away, and when you come back, nothing will have happened because you’re not doing anything on the site.
Websites are not like programs that run constantly. They run, generate a page, and then they stop. The importer process gets triggered when you visit the site or “do” anything on it, but it only runs for about 20-30 seconds before it’s done. That’s not enough time to do the full import. So it reschedules itself to start again in one-minute, but in order for it to start up at all, somebody has to “do something” on the website. Doesn’t matter what, just visiting the site is enough.
The importer is designed for you to set it up, then go away and do other stuff on the site. Not to sit there and wait until it’s done, because it will never be done if you don’t do other things. Set up a theme. Play with other plugins. Learn how to use WordPress. Importers tend to be used by people migrating to WordPress, and those people tend to explore the site a bit and try to figure out how it works.
If for some reason you are unable to actually use the site until the import is done, then set up some program to hit the the /wp-cron.php URL every minute. That will kick off the cron job once a minute until it finishes.
I was able to get the import to go through locally by refreshing every few minutes and clicking “continue.” I am currently in the process of zipping up the uploads folder and uploading it to my hosted site.
I am not new to WordPress, been using it for 7+ years, I am already quite familiar with how it works.
Thank you for the response.
