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Several years ago, I launched a WordPress website called Design to Startup, posted 19 articles, then stopped writing there. I decided to post all future articles on this site instead.

But I wondered how to move the posts from my old site to this site.

I had poured a lot of time and effort into writing those posts, like this one about what to charge as a WordPress consultant, which had some great feedback and thousands of readers.

The comments on that post were particularly valuable to me. How could I transfer all of the posts and keep the comments, timestamp, and categories in tact?

After no luck on my “how to” research, I began moving the posts over one-by-one: copying the code of each post from the WordPress text editor, editing the timestamp, and copying the comments. Two problems:

  1. it was taking too long
  2. the comments all listed me as the author

Eventually, I found this video:


(source)

Good news, WordPress has just the feature I needed – built in!

This works for making transferring posts, pages, comments, categories and custom fields (like post status, data, permalinks, ping status, etc.).

Watch the video, its great. But in summary:

  1. In the WordPress admin of the old site, go to Tools>Export
  2. Choose either “All content” “Posts” or “Pages“. Leave other options as default unless you have other preferences. Click “Download Export File” and save the file.
  3. In the WordPress admin of the new site, go to Tools>Import. Select “WordPress“, install the importer by clicking “Install” in the popup, and “Activate Plugin & Run Importer“, then select the file to upload (the one you just downloaded). Click “Upload file and import
  4. Follow instructions to assign the author as you prefer, check the checkbox to “download and import file attachments“, then click “Submit“.

DONE!

How cool. Saved me tons of time and works like a charm. Be sure to do 301 redirects to redirect traffic and for SEO purposes.