NonDeveloper who want to figure out how to make DevKinsta work. Help?

Hi folks, I am an amateur developer and was really hoping that I could just follow the instructions and I would be able to use DevKinsta to keep a cloned copy of my website locally for testing purposes. It hasn’t gone well. Not for me, or for my two developers. On my computer, the site I installed from the live Kinsta site looked wonky and the site I installed from the staging site came in blank. One of my developers got the staging page to install, and it looks right upon first inspection, but it runs too slowly to be useful. I guess I am curious, are some sites incompatible with DevKinsta or are we all just doing something wrong? (https://hosthelpr.com/) And if there is still optimism that this could work, is there anybody out there that could provide some handholding to make it happen?

Hello @marissachan Melissa :wave: Welcome to DevKinsta community!

Thank you for reaching us out!
Please allow me to answer and reply to you as follow:

On my computer, the site I installed from the live Kinsta site looked wonky and the site I installed from the staging site came in blank.

Could you please provide more information such as the computer’s hardware/specs you’re using and the operating system (O/S) name and the O/S version (e.g., Mac Ventura 13.1, Linux Ubuntu 20.04, Windows 10 Pro, etc.) ? Are you using the latest DevKinsta version as well as the latest Docker version?

For the site that you installed from the Staging site that came in blank, could you please check your browser’s console, and see if it’s showing any errors there?

And please also check the error log file of your local site in question in your local computer’s folder (e.g., for example on Linux environment, it might be something like this: /home/yourlocalusername/DevKinsta/logs/yousitename_error.log ) and see if it’s showing any error messages in there.

One of my developers got the staging page to install, and it looks right upon first inspection, but it runs too slowly to be useful.

Similar question as above, may we know the computer’s hardware/specs and the O/S name and version, the DevKinsta and Docker version, used by your developer? In case if they’re using Windows 10, are they using WSL 2 or Hyper-V ?

I guess I am curious, are some sites incompatible with DevKinsta or are we all just doing something wrong? (https://hosthelpr.com/) And if there is still optimism that this could work, is there anybody out there that could provide some handholding to make it happen?

In general the WordPress sites should be compatible with DevKinsta, though I’ve seen some reported cases where local WP sites pages load very slow on Windows environments. Like this case mentioned in this thread yesterday for example.

If you or your developers are experiencing the same on Windows environments, perhaps if you have other spare computers running on Linux or Mac , and may want to give it a try with that O/S - and compare the results.

Cheers,
Agus