Request Timeout Error when Importing Flow/Step Templates

The flow templates are not getting imported? Then you are on the right article. This will help you to fix this connection timed out error message. Let’s check what this error is about and how to fix it.

This message will be displayed while importing the flow’s ready-made templates.

This problem is a very common server related issue. In most of the cases not created by a particular theme or plugin, nor by WordPress.

WordPress uses something called cURL to communicate with other websites, specifically using this function: wp_remote_get()

This is a core WordPress function that we use to import the ready-made templates from our website to your website. When you click to import the flow, an API request is made to our templates.cartflows.com website to get the requested flow template.

If this API request is blocked then you will get the connection timeout error and the flow will not be imported.

It’s necessary for your website to communicate with our website, to ask for the ready-made template and once the API request is successfully received and processed by our server, we serve the requested flow to your website in the response of the API request..

When cURL times out, it typically means one of the two websites is blocking that communication. This can happen via firewalls or other means of server security.

To debug this issue, If you see that the Flow is not getting imported and the import button is saying Importing Template for a long time then check is there any error in the browser’s Console tab.

If you don’t get the console error then the error message will be automatically displayed on the flow import popup as displayed in the above screenshot.

To fix this issue, there are different ways. Let’s check the first and the main way due to which this type of error occurred.

• Make sure that the firewall or any security-related plugins are not blocking the outgoing API requests.
  • If you are using such plugins then try disabling them for a short time.
  • Ask your host if there are firewalls or security modules (e.g. mod_security) that could block the outgoing cURL requests.
  • If it is blocking the outgoing API request to our server then you need to whitelist our website which is template.cartflows.com from your end so that the API call may not get blocked.
    
• If no firewall or security plugins are installed then you can check for the alternate solutions as follows.
  • Make sure your server is running a recent version of PHP and the cURL library.
  • Try increasing your PHP memory limit.
  • Try increasing your cURL timeout limit.
  • Ask your host if there is some limitation with wp-cron, or if loopback is disabled.
  • Install the Query Monitor plugin and check the status of the HTTP API Calls in the admin page where the error is displayed.

• If you are using managed WordPress hosting, then below are the solution you can try.
  • In the managed WordPress hosting, the hosting provider restricts the execution time and the memory limit of the server, which can generate a curl 28 error message.
  • Check with the hosting provider that the outgoing WordPress HTTP REST API requests are blocked or restricted or not. If they are restricted then ask them to exclude them from their CURL tool to solve this curl 28 error on your website

If none of the above points fixes the issue, then you will need to ask your hosting support to confirm that your server can communicate with our templates server which is templates.cartflows.com via cURL without any limitations.

If still not working then please open a support request from our website and share your website’s IP address with us so that we can check if is it banned from our server or not. But in most cases, this does not happen at our server, because our server is made to handle tons of requests of such types.