Exporting your WordPress data

Published: August 2014

Every now and again you will come across the need to either backup your website data or move to a new hosting provider.  When this happens you will need to export your WordPress data; and WordPress has an easy to use tool which can help.

You can export a wide range of data from your website including, but not limited to, posts, pages, custom post types, comments, categories and users.

Navigating to Tools > Export will show you what options you have available for exporting your data.

If you merely want to export all your website data then you can simply select ‘All content’ at the top of the list and then click on the ‘Download Export File’ button.  This will download a file to your computer in WXR format.

Essentially, this is an XML file which will contain all the data on your site and can be used to import this data on another installation of WordPress.  As you may have guessed, this can be done from Tools > Import.

Filters

If you only want to export your Posts, then you can select ‘Posts’ from the list, as shown in the image above.
You should notice that selecting a specific type of data to export will give you additional options for your export.  In the instance shown above, we have the option to export posts by their category, author, date they were published or their status.

Once you are finished setting your filters for your export, click on the ‘Download Export File’.

Later in our WordPress Weekly series we will cover the Import functionality of WordPress to accompany this article.