I've migrated a site from a live server to a localhost using the WP Migrate DB plugin. I've done this process a couple of times before and it's all been fine. This time however I've migrated a site from an https: connection and I can't get into the site on my localhost. It gives me the following error:

This site can’t provide a secure connection

localhost sent an invalid response.
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

I'm guessing that in the back end of Wordpress I need to change something either in the database, or in the Dashboard > Settings > General tab.

At the moment I can't get into the site though, so I would think i'll have to do it via the database?

Any help or assistance would be awesome. I don't quite know where to start.

Paul.

I've migrated a site from a live server to a localhost using the WP Migrate DB plugin. I've done this process a couple of times before and it's all been fine. This time however I've migrated a site from an https: connection and I can't get into the site on my localhost. It gives me the following error:

This site can’t provide a secure connection

localhost sent an invalid response.
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

I'm guessing that in the back end of Wordpress I need to change something either in the database, or in the Dashboard > Settings > General tab.

At the moment I can't get into the site though, so I would think i'll have to do it via the database?

Any help or assistance would be awesome. I don't quite know where to start.

Paul.

• database
• migration
• https

5 Answers 5

This is because the site_url and homeurl of your original installation are set to HTTPS in the database, so you can't access your website on localhost unless you:

1. Change these values to non-ssl
2. Install a SSL certificate on localhost

I will only explain the first case since installing a certificate is out of this community's scope.

To do this, you have 2 options.

Directly edit the downloaded SQL file

Open the MySQL export that you just downloaded from your server. Search for wp_options and you will find a line in your database like this:

INSERT INTO `wp_options` (`option_id`, `option_name`, `option_value`, `autoload`) VALUES

The 2 lines below this one are siteurl and homeurl. Change both of their values to http://localhost/. Pay attention to quotes and commas! So, the 3 first line will look like this:

INSERT INTO `wp_options` (`option_id`, `option_name`, `option_value`, `autoload`) VALUES
(1, 'siteurl', 'http://localhost/', 'yes'),
(2, 'home', 'http://localhost', 'yes'),

Then upload your SQL file. That's it.

Update the values by PHPMyAdmin

If you have PHPMyAdmin installed on your localhost, or you have enough knowledge to directly update the tables via command line, the proceed with this method.

Login to your database by PHPMyAdmin. From the left navigation menu, choose the proper database. Now, select the wp_options table from the right section.

Again, the two beginning values will be siteurl and homeurl, which you can simply update to http://localhost/ without worrying about making a mistake by editing the original SQL file.

In the wp_options table, you will find two rows that have the site URL. Change those two values.

Your media and other links to internal pages might have to adjusted, though. That's why I let the great WP Clone plugin (https://wordpress/plugins/wp-clone-by-wp-academy/ ) do all the work for me. You just install the plugin on the source system, back it up, then install the plugin on the target system, and restore.

Great plugin, takes all the work out of moving (cloning) a site. I sometimes have to do the restore twice (the first fails for a mysterious reason), but the retry works just fine. All data, users, content, etc moved very nicely.

For my part, it was different from the other answers. My database was set correctly to http://localhost but I had a plugin installed to manage SSL (Really Simple SSL).

So I renamed the folder /wp-content/plugins/really-simple-ssl to something different and it worked.

And to access /wp-admin without SSL, you need to change your /wp-config.php file and set FORCE_SSL_ADMIN to false.

I have faced this problem. what i did is that-

2. remove wp-security plugin
3. remove wp-config defien force SSL
4. removed browser cache
5. changed wp-option table site_url and home URL
6. updated .htaccess with wp default .htacess

Nothing works.

Finally what I did is that-

Removing .htaccess permanently works fine for me.

Hope this will help someone to get rid of this problem.

That you can do quickly with these 2 constants offered by WordPress.

Your add it to the start of the wp-config.php file and after the opening of the <?php tags.

define ('WP_HOME', 'http://localhost/wordpress-folder-name' );
define ('WP_SITEURL', 'http://localhost/wordpress-folder-name' );