WordPress – How to Migrate Posts from a Site to Another

This tutorial will guide you to migrate posts between WordPress sites correctly.

This can be really useful if you’re duplicating your WordPress live site to make changes and try things on a local or staging site. Also, it’ll prove useful if you’re migrating your site from a WordPress installation to another, from a hosting service to another, etc.

We’ll use the WP Sheet Editor – Post Types plugin.

Use an intuitive spreadsheet inside WordPress to:

• View and edit posts, pages or custom post types quickly
• Bulk edit pages, posts or custom post types
• Do advanced searches of your posts, pages or custom post types quickly
• Import posts, pages or custom post types from Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
• Download all items of any post type to a CSV file.
• Bulk edit fields generated by other plugins.

Once you install and activate the plugin on both sites, follow these simple steps to transfer WordPress posts from a site to another.

1- Open the posts’ spreadsheet on both sites

To open the posts’ spreadsheet, you need to go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Posts.

As you can see, for this example on how to export and import WordPress posts, we have two sites. The source site is our Live Site, which contains the posts we need to export to a CSV file.

The target site is our Local Site, which contains no posts at all and where we’ll import all the exported posts from the Live Site.

2- Export the WordPress posts from the source site

WP Sheet Editor allows you to easily export your WordPress posts to a CSV file that can be edited with Excel, Google Sheets or any other CSV editor software.

You need to click Export on the top toolbar.

After that, you need to select the following values to configure the export of the WordPress posts to a CSV file:

• What columns do you want to export: Click Select all or Select active columns
• Which rows do you want to export: All the rows from my current search
• What app will you use to edit this file (optional): Select any of the available apps.
• Name of this export (optional): You can give this export a name for future exports.
• Click Start new export to download the post comments to a CSV file.

Once your WordPress posts export to a CSV file, you can open the downloaded file with Excel, Google Sheets, or any other CSV editor.

This is how our CSV file with the exported WordPress posts looks in WPS Office, for example.

You could apply changes in the CSV before importing the posts to the new site.

Also, you could apply changes or create new posts and import them to the same source site to just make changes instead of migrating your content to a new site.

3- Import WordPress posts to the target site

Once you have downloaded (and maybe edited) the posts, you can move from the source site to the target site in order to import the WordPress posts.

You can open the Import tool with one click on the top toolbar.

Now you need to select the following values to upload the CSV file with the WordPress posts:

• Source: CSV file from my computer
• Click Select File and choose the file from your computer.
• Click Next.

Then, you need to click the Import all the columns button.

After that, you need to select the following values to configure the import of your WordPress posts on the target site:

• Do you want to update or create items: Here you have several options that are important to consider:
  • Create new items and update existing items: Use this option to import new posts and update existing posts. In this case, you need to match the existing posts using the SLUG field both in the CSV Field and the WordPress Field.
  • Only create new items, ignore existing items: Use this option to only import the missing items and ignore the existing ones.
  • Import all rows as new: Use this option if you want to create posts only.
  • Update existing items, ignore new items: Use this option if you want to only update existing posts and ignore (not import) new posts. In this case, you need to match the existing posts using the SLUG field both in the CSV Field and the WordPress Field.
• Click Next.

Once you have configured the import of the WordPress posts, you will see a preview of how the posts will look imported on the spreadsheet.

If everything looks OK, you need to click The preview is fine, start import to complete the import process.

This is how the WordPress posts look once they’re imported to the target site.

Migrating WordPress posts is really easy with WP Sheet Editor!

As you see, it is really simple to migrate your WordPress posts between sites with WP Sheet Editor; you just need these simple steps:

1. Install the plugin on both the source and the target site.
2. Export posts from the source site.
3. Import posts on the target site.

And if you want to learn how to migrate the WordPress post comments between sites, you can read this tutorial.