WordPress Importer

Description

The WordPress Importer will import the following content from a WordPress export file:

• Posts, pages and other custom post types
• Comments and comment meta
• Custom fields and post meta
• Categories, tags and terms from custom taxonomies and term meta
• Authors

For further information and instructions please see the documention on Importing Content.

Filters

The importer has a couple of filters to allow you to completely enable/block certain features:

• import_allow_create_users: return false if you only want to allow mapping to existing users
• import_allow_fetch_attachments: return false if you do not wish to allow importing and downloading of attachments
• import_attachment_size_limit: return an integer value for the maximum file size in bytes to save (default is 0, which is unlimited)

There are also a few actions available to hook into:

• import_start: occurs after the export file has been uploaded and author import settings have been chosen
• import_end: called after the last output from the importer

Installation

The quickest method for installing the importer is:

1. Visit Tools -> Import in the WordPress dashboard
2. Click on the WordPress link in the list of importers
3. Click “Install Now”
4. Finally click “Activate Plugin & Run Importer”

If you would prefer to do things manually then follow these instructions:

1. Upload the wordpress-importer folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Go to the Tools -> Import screen, click on WordPress

FAQ

Help! I’m getting out of memory errors or a blank screen.

If your exported file is very large, the import script may run into your host’s configured memory limit for PHP.

A message like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted” indicates that the script can’t successfully import your XML file under the current PHP memory limit. If you have access to the php.ini file, you can manually increase the limit; if you do not (your WordPress installation is hosted on a shared server, for instance), you might have to break your exported XML file into several smaller pieces and run the import script one at a time.

For those with shared hosting, the best alternative may be to consult hosting support to determine the safest approach for running the import. A host may be willing to temporarily lift the memory limit and/or run the process directly from their end.

— Support Article: Importing Content

Reviews

So much bugs

liamanderson1993 July 18, 2024 1 reply

We tried this multiple times but not working. It has some conflict with hosting and our hosting company suggests not to use this plugin. It wasted so many hours in the process and now I need to find another alternative.

Getting better and better

mrkenobi November 4, 2023

I remember the time when this plugin was partially useless, but today I managed to export all of my posts and images easily and import them to my new installation. So, there was no need for a 3rd party plugin.This is useful for cluttered databases: when you transfer all your posts and images to new installation, then your database will have nothing but posts and images. Light and fast.Bye

Excellent

ianpeterharding October 24, 2023

Works very well indeed!

Works well for moving posts between blogs.

kelson October 6, 2023 1 reply

Good for the main use cases: restore from backup, and moving posts between blogs. Unfortunately the image import doesn’t seem to work (WordPress 6.3 with plugin 0.8.1), which makes it a pain to clean up image-heavy posts. One thing I’d like to do with this that I can’t is to import another copy of a cross-post and merge the comment threads. As it is, the best I can do is import the duplicate copy and then use another plugin (or dig into the database) to move the comments around.

Very helpful

Bulat2 August 10, 2023

Needed to copy the content of the old website to the one which is developed from scratch – and it worked!

PERFECT BACKUP for Categories Users Comments

JEFF BAYGENTS July 21, 2023 1 reply

I’ve used this just a few times in the past 18 months. And one time it was an incredible, urgent need as there were no server backups available from a web host (not with them anymore). Another time I made a mistake and deleted some comments. Anyway, this is only the 2nd review for this plugin within the past year or so. And I see a lot of negative scored posts. After reading them, I noticed a number of the 1-star reviews seemed to be user error. I’ve been in IT Management, development, and consulting for 4 decades. I use very little custom coding on my sites because, in my past experience, there are far less issues during updates and upgrades. So, with that said, I have also noticed there are a lot of optional settings to decide when using this tool. And many are preselected that I unselect. I recommend taking your time when using this tool and defining your own settings every time you use it. I use about 20 plugins and there’s no interference with any of them. But, I am careful about which plugins I retain. Also, I use this plugin just create backups or to perform restores from them. Then, I uninstall it until I need it again. For example, I’m here today because I’m getting ready to use it again as I’m about to make some major category changes. It will be very handy to use this tool to perform backups (and any needed restores) instead of using a site restore that will reset recent work on posts or pages. I use this as an additional backup and as an archive for all my sites. It’s always saved me when I needed it and I’ve found it to be reliable and solid. It’s been absolutely perfect for me when performing work on tags and categories so I don’t have to use a site restore.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

0.8.3

• Update compatibility tested-up-to to WordPress 6.7.
• Update call to post_exists to include post_type in the query
• PHP 8.4 compatibility fixes.

0.8.2

• Update compatibility tested-up-to to WordPress 6.4.2.
• Update doc URL references.
• Adjust workflow triggers.

0.8.1

• Update compatibility tested-up-to to WordPress 6.2.
• Update paths to build status badges.

0.8

• Update minimum WordPress requirement to 5.2.
• Update minimum PHP requirement to 5.6.
• Update compatibility tested-up-to to WordPress 6.1.
• PHP 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2 compatibility fixes.
• Fix a bug causing blank lines in content to be ignored when using the Regex Parser.
• Fix a bug resulting in a PHP fatal error when IMPORT_DEBUG is enabled and a category creation error occurs.
• Improved Unit testing & automated testing.

0.7

• Update minimum WordPress requirement to 3.7 and ensure compatibility with PHP 7.4.
• Fix bug that caused not importing term meta.
• Fix bug that caused slashes to be stripped from imported meta data.
• Fix bug that prevented import of serialized meta data.
• Fix file size check after download of remote files with HTTP compression enabled.
• Improve accessibility of form fields by adding missing labels.
• Improve imports for remote file URLs without name and/or extension.
• Add support for wp:base_blog_url field to allow importing multiple files with WP-CLI.
• Add support for term meta parsing when using the regular expressions or XML parser.
• Developers: All PHP classes have been moved into their own files.
• Developers: Allow to change IMPORT_DEBUG via wp-config.php and change default value to the value of WP_DEBUG.

0.6.4

• Improve PHP7 compatibility.
• Fix bug that caused slashes to be stripped from imported comments.
• Fix for various deprecation notices including wp_get_http() and screen_icon().
• Fix for importing export files with multiline term meta data.

0.6.3

• Add support for import term metadata.
• Fix bug that caused slashes to be stripped from imported content.
• Fix bug that caused characters to be stripped inside of CDATA in some cases.
• Fix PHP notices.

0.6.2

• Add wp_import_existing_post filter, see Trac ticket #33721.

0.6

• Support for WXR 1.2 and multiple CDATA sections
• Post aren’t duplicates if their post_type’s are different

0.5.2

• Double check that the uploaded export file exists before processing it. This prevents incorrect error messages when
  an export file is uploaded to a server with bad permissions and WordPress 3.3 or 3.3.1 is being used.

0.5

• Import comment meta (requires export from WordPress 3.2)
• Minor bugfixes and enhancements

0.4

• Map comment user_id where possible
• Import attachments from wp:attachment_url
• Upload attachments to correct directory
• Remap resized image URLs correctly

0.3

• Use an XML Parser if possible
• Proper import support for nav menus
• … and much more, see Trac ticket #15197

0.1

• Initial release