Export One Category or Posts from Different Categories with WordPress

If you’re somewhat familiar with WordPress, then you probably know that you can export the contents of your site and import them to a new site.

But what if you don’t want to export your entire site? What if you only want to export one or two categories? Or even more complicated, what if you want to export select posts from a number of different categories?

It’s not as hard as it might seem.

How to Export Single Categories

If you’d like to export a category or two, then WordPress is already set up for this.

Simply go to the export function in your Tools menu. (Tools > Export)

You will have an option to select “Posts.” When you do this, more options appear, including the option to export a single category. Simply select your category, and then download your export file.

On your new site, go to your import function and upload the export file you just downloaded. (Tools > Import.)

Note: When you import a file for the first time, you will need to choose the system you’re importing from (in this case it’s WordPress), and then you will be prompted to install an importer plugin. It’s pretty straight-forward from there.

Import More than One Category

If you need to export a number of different categories (but still not the entire site), then just go through the same process above as many times as you need to. By default, the system will name each export file the same even though they are different categories. You will want to give unique names to the files before saving them so that they don’t get over-written.

How to Export Individual Posts from Different Categories

What if you have a situation where you’d like to move two posts from Category A, three posts from Category B, five posts from Category C, etc.?

The answer to this problem is to make a new category (e.g. “Move”), and then go through and add all the posts that you’d like to move to that new category. (If you’d like to have the same old categories on your new site, then leave your posts in their old categories as well.)

After that, simply export the new category (in our example, the “Move” category) and then import it to your other site. Once your posts are on your new site, you can then simply delete the newly created category (the “Move” category). When you import your posts, their original categories will be imported as well.

Remember to Redirect

Remember to use 301 redirects for the posts you’ve moved from one site to another. This will let the search engines know that you’ve moved the posts. There are “301 redirection” plugins to help you with this.

Tags:

• categories
• import-export