Hey All. I have been in marketing and web design for nearly 20 years at this point. The other day I was presented with a request I have not gotten before. I am unsure how to proceed, as everything I look up tells me to accomplish this in a different way. I would love your advice.
I have a rather large wordpress site for a manufacturer. They have a show coming up, and will not have internet at the show. They would like to download the entire site, everything, and run it offline on a tablet.
I know this is possible, but for the life of me I cannot find the proper way to go about it. Anyone have any experience in this? I assume I will need some sort of software on the tablet to run the site once exported.
Any tips, directions, or advice would be greatly appreciated. I am just in new, unfamiliar waters with this one. Thanks to you all.
-TheMarketingDad
[Local app](https://localwp.com/) will run the site on a local server.
If you install the WP Migrate plugin on your site you can export the whole site as a zip and drag and drop it into Local
this just seems like a situation set up to fail. why not just tether the ipad to a phone wifi hotspot or something. i find it hard to believe the conference doesnt have wifi, though wtf??
A plugin called Simply static has a way to export a wordpress site as an html for offline use.
Works great for simple sites. Although it didn’t work with some sites with advanced plugins (interactive floorplan, vr tours etc)
Then you can probably convert the html site to an ios app.
If it is a brochure site, just use an online service like [WebToZip](https://webtozip.com/) to convert it to static files and run it directly in the tablet’s browser. But if the site is dynamic, you could leverage [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/) to create a native app. For iOS, there’s[ this example](https://wordpress.github.io/wordpress-playground/guides/wordpress-native-ios-app) – although it seems like a rather complex project.
This is possible, but to do it would be a big job and possibly a complicated one depending on the website. The reason you’ll get a lot of different suggestions is because there are many ways to do this which will change depending on the setup you have. Nobody can give you a full answer to this without knowing a lot more about your website and the tablet you are using.
There’s also a high risk of it not working in the show, for whatever reason, which is exactly the scenario your client is trying to avoid. Far better, and probably cheaper than your time, to find a way to get some mobile signal or wifi and just use the website that already works.
If you are on a mac you can use SiteSucker, it’s paid like 5 bucks but worth is. Creates a completely static site.
On a tablet it may be tough, but on a Windows/Mac/Linux laptop it’s not the worst to run locally. You’ll have to do a fair amount of setup to get WordPress running on your local computer, and then you can just copy the site with something like WP Migrate.
Do you know about wget?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6348289/download-a-working-local-copy-of-a-webpage
You can run a wget command and it will download the entire website, put the pages into folders, correct all the image paths, the works. Then you can just open your entry point html file (index.html or whatever) and browse through the entire site locally.
Instead of a tablet run it on a windows laptop with a touchscreen and flipscreen. Then you can run it on Local WP.
Another option if it absolutely must be on a tablet is setup your own wifi router in the area, run the site on a server/laptop/desktop/etc that’s connected to the router. then have the tablet browse to the serverIP address over the wifi/LAN. There won’t be a ‘gateway’ so no internet but you can browse over the LAN. This could be fairly portable if it’s just a small wifi router and a laptop.
You understand you can’t place orders or submit forms and expect the emails to send though right? There will be some limitations.
If your website doesn’t need the actual functionality and is more informative then you can do a static site rip using wget or httrack and place the files on the tablet. Sounds like you need the functionality.
Local WP?
People have already suggested different ways to go about it.
However, in my opinion you should reject the idea of running it offline on the tablet and instead connect the tablet to the hotspot.
I get it, the location where the show is going to happen won’t have an internet line. But you are still going to have phones with you and access to a mobile internet connection.
Why not just use the phone’s internet connection through the hotspot.
This is a straightforward solution to the problem. And won’t involve anything complex. There is more possibility of something going wrong with the offline setup rather than just loading the site actually on your iPad using wifi.
This is very doable depending on the sysadmin skills.
Android is not exactly Linux. So the first step is to build a Linux environment on the tablet. The easiest way is to use termux and installing a distro such as Ubuntu on it. Then it’s just a matter of turning on apache or nginx and mysql or your favorite way of running WordPress.
Or you can use a Windows PC like everyone says.
Or take a chromebook plus and turn on Linux and away you go with any of the methods to run WordPress locally.
I had a similar request a while back, but very last minute. I forget now if it was a conference or a weird client meeting, but internet including cell signal was not reliable – nor the sales team’s computer skills so I created PDFs of the site using GoFullPage chrome plugin to get the entire page and then I created links in that PDF to the other pages. They were comfortable without dynamic elements working like our office location maps and background videos. I did work with them to only make it for the pages they were going to want. I thought it felt a little cheap, but I only had a part of an afternoon to create it. under the circumstances and with trust in the sales agent, it was successful.
Their only complaint was that they couldn’t see the full page on the screen at once while also at full size. I told them they could it they found an iPad that was very long and adjusted its physical size for the different pages.
Set up small computer or raspberry Pi as a wifi hotspot (built in on the pi) and host the website on the “server”. You can install Docker engine (or just run a full lamp server), host the entire site locally on the pi, point traffic to the Docker container/port running the website, connect your tablet to the hotspot, and it’ll be able to hit the website.
You can even run it on a small usb battery for literal days in some cases. It’s super compact and is very fault tolerant. If it’s well configured, you can just unplug it, plug it back in, and it should all come right back up.
Though, the biggest warning will be if you plan on entering data, or forbid, running ecommerce on it for some reason. Database syncing the data from local to production will be a certain nightmare. Do not do this. Marketing materials only.
I’ve done this for clients at trade shows and it ran without a hitch. They took entries in a contact form for contests/lead gen (had about five tablets / laptops connected to the site/Pi) and handled entries and qr codes on multiple devices. They were very happy with the setup.
Very non-technical folks handled setup and teardown multiple times just fine. Even made a page where they could button click a download / backup of the form entries before moving the device.