To run WP Configurator Pro you need a working WordPress installation on your server. The plugin requires WordPress 5.6 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher. Beyond that, a few PHP settings are worth checking — the defaults on shared hosting are often too low for building large configurators or importing template files.
You don’t have to guess at your current values. Go to WP Configurator → Status in your WordPress admin. It shows your PHP version, memory limit, post max size, PHP time limit, max input vars and max upload size, and flags anything that is too low.
Configuration
Memory Limit: WordPress sometimes shows a memory exhausted error when you activate a plugin, save a large configurator, or run an import. Raising PHP’s memory limit fixes it. WP Configurator warns when the limit is below 64M, but for configurators with many image layers, 256M is a comfortable starting point. You can have a closer look at how to increase the PHP memory limit here.
Keep in mind that memory is consumed per request, and the peak is set by the largest single image being processed — not by how many images you have. WordPress decodes an image into raw pixels to generate its thumbnail sizes, so a single 6000 × 4000 px photo can need well over 100 MB of memory even though the JPEG file is only 3 MB. Resizing oversized source images before you upload them does more for stability than raising the limit.
Max Upload Size: Depending on the web hosting company you choose and the package you select, each of you will see a maximum file upload limit on your Media Uploader page in WordPress. This limit applies both to the layer images you upload and to the .json or .zip files you import. You can have a closer look at how to increase the PHP Max Upload Size here.
Two directives control this, and the effective limit is whichever is smaller — so raise them together. post_max_size must always be equal to or larger than upload_max_filesize.
Max Input Vars: Every group, sub-group, layer and option in a configurator is submitted as a separate field when you press Update. PHP silently discards everything past max_input_vars (default: 1000), which shows up as layers or options disappearing after a save. Large configurators need this raised well above the default.
A few recommended values for your php.ini file:
memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 64M
post_max_size = 64M
max_execution_time = 300
max_input_vars = 20000If you don’t have access to php.ini, most hosts expose the same settings in their control panel — cPanel under MultiPHP INI Editor, Plesk under PHP Settings — or their support team can change them for you.
Recommended PHP Settings for Large File Imports
Before using the table below, it helps to know what an import actually does.
The file you upload is a .json template, or a .zip containing several of them. It is plain text, and it is usually well under a megabyte even for a large configurator, because it does not contain the images. It contains the image URLs. During the import, the plugin downloads each image from the source site one at a time, saves it into your uploads folder, and generates the thumbnail sizes.
This means the cost of an import scales with the number of images, not with the size of the file you upload — and the resource that runs out first is almost always time, not memory or upload size.
| Number of Images / Rows | Typical import time | max_execution_time | memory_limit | Notes / Tips |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 100 | under 1 minute | 300 | 256M | Defaults usually work |
| 100 – 500 | 1 – 8 minutes | 600 | 256M | Check your web server timeout as well |
| 500 – 1500 | 8 – 25 minutes | 900 | 512M | Split the export into smaller files |
| 1500 or more | 25 minutes or more | 900 | 512M | Import in batches — a single request is unlikely to finish |
These times are approximate. The real figure depends mostly on how quickly the source site serves its images, and on how many thumbnail sizes your theme and plugins register.
Raising max_execution_time on its own is often not enough. WP Configurator already lifts the PHP time limit for the duration of an import, but that only takes effect if your host permits ini_set(), and many managed hosts do not. Even with unlimited PHP execution time, the request still has to survive every other timeout in front of it:
- Web server — nginx
fastcgi_read_timeout, ApacheTimeout/ProxyTimeout, or the LiteSpeed connection timeout - PHP-FPM —
request_terminate_timeout - Cloudflare or a similar proxy — cuts connections at roughly 100 seconds on the free plan, and this cannot be extended
Any one of these will end the import with a 504 Gateway Timeout regardless of what is in your php.ini. If an import stops partway and the browser shows a 504, that is the layer to investigate.
Splitting a large import. Rather than pushing timeouts higher and higher, export your configurators individually instead of as one bulk .zip, and import them a few at a time. This is safe to do: the plugin records the source URL of every image it imports, so images that were already brought over are recognised and reused instead of downloaded again. Re-running an import does not create duplicates, and a batch that timed out can simply be run again — it will skip everything that already came through.
The source images must be publicly reachable. The plugin fetches each image URL over HTTP with a 60-second timeout per image. If the export came from a staging site sitting behind HTTP authentication, an IP firewall, or a “coming soon” plugin, those images cannot be downloaded and the import will finish with layers missing. Make the source site reachable — or import while it is still live — before starting.
⚠️ SSL Certificate Errors When Importing Images
The SSL certificate problem occurs when the site hosting the images uses a certificate that this server does not trust. This commonly happens with:
- Staging sites using a self-signed certificate
- Sites with a missing intermediate certificate
http://image URLs where the source server redirects tohttps://
When this happens, the import stops after the first 10 failed images instead of continuing to retry hundreds of times.
The configurator is still created, but without the affected images.
How to Fix It
Option 1 — Fix the certificate
Fix the SSL certificate on the source site, then click Try again.
Already-imported images and completed configurators are skipped, so only the failed work needs to be processed again.
Option 2 — Trust the host temporarily
Click Try again, trusting <host> to skip certificate checks for that host.
⚠️ Security warning: This applies only to the current import and is not remembered afterward. Use this option only for a staging site that you control, as it removes protection against an impersonated source.
⏱ Retry Within 24 Hours
Make sure to retry the import within 24 hours.
The uploaded file is automatically deleted one day after the import finishes. After that, you will need to upload the file again.