I have an old WordPress (3.4.5) and before the update I want to export all of my posts, pages, categories, … But when I do it with the export tool, it doesn’t export everything – probably because of the size of my blog.
Could you help me?
Thank you very much! 🙂
You could try to install some backup plugin like BackUpWordPress.
It can backup files, database or both. And after backup you simply click on download button to get the file.
Then you need to convert that MySQL file to XML. I looked for any tools for this purpose but I wasn’t able to find any free one.
You could try to do it using PHP. Check this question on Stackoverflow regarding this.
Some web servers get a timeout or run out of memory while preparing big WordPress XML data exports, failing silently in the way you describe: the system returns an XML file that seems okay but that is actually incomplete.
Sometimes it is possible to increase the max timeout and / or memory limit tweaking the configuration options in the php.ini file of your web server, or via some code changes – though some shared hostings wouldn’t allow to do this. This article by Artem Russakovskii has more information about that.
Another option is to directly call the export function from the command line. Eric Stone’s code does exactly that by directly calling the WordPress exporter and sending the output as an XML file.
Finally, and depending on your WordPress version, it is also possible to limit the export to some authors or date ranges. That would decrease the size of each partial XML export, allowing you to export smaller chunks with an increased chance of completing.