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Site Wide Versus Page Scoped Import

The confirmation dialog asks one question before an import begins: Activate this demo site-wide, ticked by default. Ticked, the demo becomes your site's design. Unticked, the demo's pages arrive inside your existing site without changing it. The imported pages render correctly either way, because every page carries its own design settings with it, so the checkbox decides only how far the demo reaches beyond its own pages. Read this page to choose deliberately.

What A Site Wide Import Changes

With the box ticked, the settings step adopts the demo as the site's design system, so everything on the site matches it, including what you build later. Concretely, it applies:

  • The demo's Theme Options, merged over yours, with the demo's values winning where both define a setting. Your licence, your analytics identifiers and your API keys are never part of a demo and are never overwritten.
  • The site identity and reading settings: the site title, the tagline, and which pages serve as the front page and the posts page.
  • The demo's header and footer as the site defaults, so archives, search results, the 404 page and every page you create later carry the demo's chrome rather than your old one. Heroes stay per-page by design.
  • The structured data identity the demo's design implies, such as its business type, so search engines type the site correctly out of the box. Every adopted value stays editable afterwards.
  • For store demos, the WooCommerce page assignments and product image settings, covered in Setting Up Your Shop.

What A Page Scoped Import Leaves Alone

With the box unticked, the settings step skips everything above: your Theme Options, site title, front page, header and footer defaults and store wiring stay untouched. The demo's pages still arrive and still render as designed, because each imported page carries its own header, footer and design assignments as page settings.

One visible consequence is worth expecting: a page-scoped import shows your site's own logo and identity on the imported pages rather than the demo's, because identity is exactly what the import promised not to change.

Whichever way the box is set, the fonts and icon sets the demo's content names are registered on your site, merged with your own registrations rather than replacing them, because the imported pages cannot render without them.

How To Choose

Ask what the site is for after the import:

  • Building a new site from the demo: leave the box ticked. You want new pages, archives and search results to match the design without per-page work.
  • Borrowing pages into an established site: untick it. You want the demo's pages as material inside a site whose identity, options and chrome are already decided.

Pitfalls

A page-scoped import "did not work" because the home page did not change. It is not supposed to. The front page assignment is part of the site-wide payload. Either re-import site-wide, or set your front page by hand under Settings > Reading.

New pages do not match the demo after a page-scoped import. Only a site-wide import adopts the demo's chrome as the defaults for future pages. A page-scoped import keeps the demo's design on the demo's pages only, by design.

Options you had set are different after a site-wide import. The demo's Theme Options win on conflict. Rolling back the import restores your previous settings, which is one of the reasons the import records itself in Import History.

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