When working on a website for a client I came across an issue when it comes to importing and exporting comments. I exported a website onto my own testing servers and worked on the site for a few days, once they were happy with the work, I imported the site back in. The issue with this was that there were around 130 comments added onto the live site during that time, meaning they were lost when I imported the new site. Luckily I had a backup of the live site before I moved it, so I was able to retrieve it. I then need to figure out how to import and export WordPress comments.
Importing and Exporting WordPress comments plugin
I searched around for a plugin that does this for you, while a came across a few, the one that I used at first didn’t work! This plugin WordPress Comments Import & Export by WebToffee, didn’t work. When I exported the comments the CSV file contained nothing. After many Google search and trying a few other things I finally found a plugin that worked.
Import and Export WordPress Data as CSV or XML
This plugin did the job right away with no issues. Import and Export WordPress Data as CSV or XML does everything I needed when it came to exporting all the comments I needed. You can see in the image below it found over 31,000 comments, you can export all of these. I only wanted some comments from the dates of the 31st of October to the 6th of November, you can do this once you have pressed “continue”.
You then simply export the comments to a CSV, the download goes into your files and you can then get red to import them into the site you need.
Importing WordPress comments from CSV
After downloading the plugin on the other site, where you need the comments imported you can easily upload the file from the previous website. Below shows the import form, you can simply drag and drop of the file, it then looks through the file and lets you upload these comments with a few clicks. You will see the comments go up instantly and the job is done!
This plugin is the only one that I could find that works, so I hope you will find it as useful as I did!
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