I recently finished a small web site project for a local Karate studio. I did all the development work using a “staged” version of their site on my local machine. The customer provided content that translated into 9 individual pages for the site. When the design was complete, I gave the customer a quick demo on my laptop. The design was approved and I was given the green light to move everything to the public installation of their site.

I quickly installed WordPress, made the necessary option settings, and uploaded the custom theme. Everything was in place except for the 9 pages of content I previously created because it was still sitting on my laptop. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time moving content around so I considered my options: cut-n-paste, MySQL export/import, or something native to WordPress.

Cut-n-Paste

Cut-n-Paste, the brute force way to move content from one WordPress site to another. This approach only makes sense if you plan to move a couple of pages; however, you need to be very methodical as it’s very easy to make a mistake. By nature I’m fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks. Therefore, cut-n-paste was not selected.

MySQL Export and Import

We hear a lot about backing up your site with MySQL. I even mentioned this as one of the steps in my post about upgrading to the latest release of WordPress. The problem with using MySQL to move content from one site to another is that it can be intimidating if you’re not comfortable with MySQL.

WordPress Export and Import

Finally I decided to see what built-in feature WordPress offered for exporting and importing content. Sure enough sitting in full view in the “Manage” section of the WordPress dashboard are two sub-section options that made my job a breeze: export and import.

How to Export and Import Content with WordPress

To complete the karate web site project I exported all of the content from the “staged” version of the site in the following manner:

1. Logged into my WordPress powered site as administration.
2. Selected the Manage section
3. Selected the Export sub-menu option
4. Accepted the “Restrict Author to All” default setting
5. Clicked the Download Export File button

WordPress automatically named the file to “wordpress-yyyy-mm-dd.xml” (where y = year, m = month, and d= day) and prompted me to save this XML file to my computer.

Once I had the content saved I needed to import it into the public facing version of the karate web site, which I did in the following manner:

1. Logged into the public facing WordPress powered site as administration.
2. Selected the Manage section
3. Selected the Import sub-menu option
4. A list of supported import formats appeared. From this list I selected WordPress
5. Clicked the Browse button to locate the previously exported XML file on my local machine
6. Pressed the Upload File and Import button which completed the process

When you use this feature, WordPress will import all posts, comments, custom fields and categories into the blog. There does appear to be a size limit of 7 MB indicated on this screen; however, unless you are moving around a very large blog, I suspect that 7 MB is more than enough.

Keep in mind that importing a WordPress XML file is not the only import option. You can also import exported content from Blogger, Blogware, DotClear, GreyMatter, LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad, RSS, and TextPattern. So, if you’re trying to move content from one of these other blogging platforms over to a WordPress powered blog, you’re in luck.

This export and import feature is simple to use and probably known by countless WordPress users; however, sometimes the simple solutions often get over looked. It’s all too easy to think, “Hey, if I need to backup my content, I need to do it with MySQL.” It’s a normal response because so much is written about backing up your MySQL database; however, don’t over look this simple built-in feature as a valid way to backup and move around your WordPress content.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips