Exporter Importer Z: move your WordPress content, not your mess
Every WordPress developer knows this moment: you need to move part of a site — a landing page, a product catalog, a set of pages from staging to production — and the tools you have don’t quite fit.
WordPress’s own export only points to your media. The importer has to download every image from the old site, and if it’s offline, slow or behind a login, you get gray boxes. Settings don’t travel either: your homepage, posts page, shop and checkout arrive as ordinary pages.
Migration plugins go the other way: they copy the whole database — transients, logs, sessions, tables from plugins you deleted years ago — and overwrite the site you were importing into.
So I built the middle way: Exporter Importer Z.
What it does:
- You choose what moves. On Tools → Export, pick content types, exact items or filters, and the settings that go with them. The homepage, the shop and the checkout wear badges, so you never leave a key page behind.
- One complete file. Content, the media it uses (attached or just used in the content), the settings that point to it and each post as readable .html — in one .wxrz or .zip.
- Imported with the tool you know. Upload it to the WordPress Importer: media comes from the file, IDs are remapped, the homepage is still the homepage. No search-and-replace.
- A whole site in the browser. Export a WordPress Playground .zip with the theme and plugins you choose. A copy made on your local server opens on playground.wordpress.net, or offline with
npx @wp-playground/cli. - Built for AI agents. Every export, import, copy and setting is an ability of the WordPress Abilities API — callable over MCP, REST, PHP or WP-CLI. The docs are agent-ready too (llms.txt and every page as Markdown).
It’s free and open source under the GPL: no account, no license key, no “pro” version holding features back.
Try it:
- Site, docs and a 1-minute demo video
- Live demo in your browser (WordPress Playground)
- Source and releases on GitHub
If it saves you an afternoon of re-uploading images and rebuilding a homepage, a star on GitHub, an issue or a note to someone moving a site helps a lot — and so does supporting it.
What’s the most painful content move you’ve had to do in WordPress?