Back when I started writing here, my main goal was to consolidate a trio of blogs I published about old courthouses, old schoolhouses, and tobacco pipes. One by one, I meticulously copied hundreds of posts. The process took forever, but it shouldn’t have. Exporting your WordPress blog is easy! Here’s how to do it.
WordPress is the content management system that powers my blog. It’s also behind 43% of the internet1. It’s user-friendly and versatile, and I’ll never blog anywhere else. That said, your needs might vary. Exporting your WordPress blog could provide flexibility, control, or peace of mind. It could also save you a ton of time compared to manually moving content like I did.
There are a couple things you should know before you export your site. For starters, you won’t receive something easy to read for your trouble. Instead, your content will export as a .xml file you can import somewhere else. The file contains your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags. Unfortunately, it’ll leave out your themes, designs, and plug-ins.
It’s worth mentioning that your .xml file also won’t include any media you’ve uploaded. Rather, it will link to your images, video, and audio so they can be imported to another site. You can download your media separately if you’re building an archive, but hold off on deleting your old blog if you want to repost it somewhere. Just set your blog to public if it isn’t already, then wait until the transfer completes.
The first step of exporting your blog is easy. On your WordPress homepage, navigate to the dashboard to the left. Scroll down to “Tools,” then click the “Export” link at the bottom of the submenu. If your site doesn’t use any plugins like Akismet, Wordfence, or Yoast, click the “Export All” button. If it does, or if you want to choose specific content to download, click the arrow next to the button to select what to export.
I decided to export the posts I published between February and March for this example. Eventually, a notification will appear at the top of the page once your site has successfully exported. Click the “Download” button to beam the .xml file to your device.
In addition to the download button, WordPress will send you an email with a download link. Regardless of which you click, you’ll find your file in a folder named something like blogname.wordpress.com-year-date-day-hour-number_number_number. Mine showed up in “Downloads” as tedshidelercom.wordpress.com-2024-02-22-11_14_03.
Your document is inside. For some reason, mine decided to open in Adobe Illustrator, a program for designing vector graphics. I wound up loading it in TextEdit. A variety of plain text editors and web browsers should have no trouble reading the file if you want to leaf through it, but I’ll warn you: it’s a little strange to see your entire blog distilled down to a single 492kb file!
It may be hard to believe, but that measly document holds enough information to restore your blog to wherever you’d like to publish it. It even includes instructions! If your goal is to reblog your content on another site, your job is complete. Unfortunately, .xml files are a pain to slog through to recover your text for a different purpose. What if I wanted to submit the text my Jackson County Courthouse post to, say, a newsletter?
My first choice would be to copy the text from my published blog, but let’s say I already deleted it. My next best bet would be to edit out all the tags and markup language in a word processor. It’d be tedious! I type like a bat out of hell, but it still took two minutes to manually reformat my 700-word post into prose. Find-and-Replace took even longer. I’m too impatient for that, so I turned to ChatGPT for help.
You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT. It’s an online chatbot trained on text from a colossal database of sources. As it trains, ChatGPT learns the patterns and relationships between words, phrases, and sentences it encounters. It uses that information to string together the most likely series of words to respond naturally to questions you ask.
I occasionally use ChatGPT to help summarize lengthy articles I’m reading, organize the sources I cite, and brainstorm new content ideas. It’s the perfect assistant to segment out the relevant parts of my post, so I opened a new window and gave the chatbot the following prompt:
Remove the markup language and tags without editing the essay itself. Convert the result into an easy-to-read essay called ‘The Jackson County Courthouse (1872/1911-)’:
I copied the data from the .xml file into my prompt, hit enter, and began to pet Disco the cat. It took ChatGPT eleven seconds to spit out what I asked for! As a result, I wound up with an exact copy of the piece I originally posted to my blog. If you have an account, here’s a link to the chat to see for yourself.
It was that simple. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of my original text and what ChatGPT returned. The chatbot didn’t add anything, it didn’t remove anything I didn’t tell it to, and it saved me a couple minutes of work. There’s some debate about the ethics of using AI in creative work2, but using a large language model like ChatGPT to separate the wheat from the chaff of an exported blog post is something I’m completely comfortable with. The results speak for themselves.
If you’re like me, you’d rather focus on your writing or photos instead of messing around with annoying technical intricacies. It might sound complicated, but exporting your WordPress site is a simple process. Using ChatGPT to remove extraneous formatting from your export file is equally straightforward. If you’re a blogger, tools like these could help maintain control over your content, transition it to another platform, and ensure that your posts remain accessible and secure.
Sources Cited
1 Silkalns, A. (2014, January 17). WordPress Statistics: How Many Websites Use WordPress in 2024? Colorlib. Web. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
2 Eckert, J. (2023, November 30). Exploring the Ethics of AI in Design. Parachute Design [Toronto]. Web. Retrieved February 26, 2024.
