Accessing on Local Host from External Browser

  • Hi All,

    Thanks in advance for your help and apologies if this has been answered before.
    I’m currently trying to access my local WordPress install from my phone and tablet for testing purposes.
    While it didn’t work at all at first (Configuration of the Apache server there), it now works but themes/images etc… are not loading, presumably from some kind of absolute URLs of the files?

    Would anyone be able to instruct me on the most appropriate way of allowing this kind of access?

    Thanks and Regards,

    Garry

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  • Hi Garry,

    What it sounds like what may be happening is that your WordPress installation still has its site url set to a location that is not accessible from your phone. Or that the URLs for these theme/images files are otherwise set up to be something your phone cannot access.

    Could you let me know what your siteurl and home url are set to, and also what the url is you are using to access the installation from your phone?

    To find out what urls they are set to, you will want to log in to WordPress and head over to the General Settings page (Settings -> General). On this page you will see two settings called “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)”.

    Should those be different from what you use to give external access to the site (ie. the url that loads the page, but not the theme files/images), you will want to change both of those settings.

    Generally speaking, if you intend on accessing the site from a device other than your “localhost” computer you will want to make sure to at least use the IP address or a different hostname as your site url.

    Let me know if you have any more questions or need any more help resolving this issue!

    I’m having a similar issue here, my site is hosted on my local web server. I can access it from the server but then I more to a client and it doesn’t display the images etc. It does show text and it resolves the IP address so I know the DNS is working.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Thread Starter GarryMcKee

    (@garrymckee)

    Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for the detailed reply and apologies for the delayed response.
    Being that I’m working on these projects on the side I haven’t gotten a chance to try out your solution but as soon as I do I’ll update you.

    Thanks for you help!

    Kind Regards,

    Garry

    No problem! Just let me know how it works out for you. ??

    @james4381: I’d recommend the same thing to you, that is, double checking the site url settings. When images don’t work in these instances it’s usually because it’s trying to access them through the wrong URL. If it’s an image in the content of a page or post, it’s very possible that you’ll need to manually change the content to have the image pulled from the right place.

    It’s a bit tricky to do this on a phone, but your developer toolbar is invaluable in troubleshooting these kinds of errors. It will show you the requests that are being made should allow you to see what’s going on.

    In most browsers you can open the developer toolbar by pressing F12. The section you will want to refer to is either “Network” or “Console”.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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