Download all your WordPress posts at once

You've written dozens, maybe hundreds, of posts. Now you want them back in one place: for a book, a collection, a new writing project, or just so they're safe. You don't need to open each post and copy it out by hand.

WordPress can already bundle up everything you've published into a single file. Data.Page turns that file into something you can actually read and work with: one row per post, with the title, date and full text side by side, in the order you wrote them.

Open the converter

What you'll end up with

A spreadsheet you can open in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers, where each line is one of your posts:

Title	Date	Post text	Link
The summer we moved north	2014-06-02	It was the kind of house that…	yoursite.com/summer-we-moved-north
On rereading old letters	2015-01-19	My grandmother kept every…	yoursite.com/rereading-old-letters
Notes from a slow winter	2015-02-27	Nothing happened this month, and…	yoursite.com/notes-slow-winter

From there you can sort by date, hide the posts you don't want, and copy the text you need straight into Word, Google Docs or Scrivener.

Step 1: Ask WordPress for your export file

This takes about a minute and doesn't need any plugins.

If you run your own WordPress site

Log in to your site's dashboard (usually yoursite.com/wp-admin).
In the left-hand menu, choose Tools, then Export.
Pick Posts. You can narrow it down by category or date range if you only want some of your writing.
Click Download Export File. You'll get a file ending in .xml.

If your blog is on WordPress.com

Go to your site's dashboard and choose Tools, then Export.
Choose to export your content. WordPress.com prepares a download link, and may also email it to you.
The download is a .zip folder. Double-click it to open it, and you'll find the .xml file inside.

Don't worry about the file looking strange. If you open the .xml file yourself, it's a wall of code. That's normal. Your writing is all in there. It just needs unpacking, which is the next step.

Step 2: Turn the file into a readable list of posts

Open the Data.Page converter.
Upload the .xml file you downloaded from WordPress.
You'll see a preview table with a row for each item in your blog.
Click Download and choose Excel (or CSV if you prefer Google Sheets).

Step 3: Tidy it up for your project

The export holds a bit more than your posts, so a few minutes of tidying helps:

Keep only finished posts. Use the status column to filter to publish if you don't want old drafts mixed in. Or keep the drafts: half-finished ideas can be useful for a new project.
Remove pages and attachments. The post type column tells you which rows are blog posts and which are things like your About page or uploaded images.
Put them in order. Sort by the date column, oldest first, and you have your writing as a timeline.
Hide the columns you don't need. For most writers, title, date and post text are all that matter.

Good to know

Will my formatting come across?

Your words, paragraphs and headings are all there. The text still carries the small formatting codes your website used, such as <p> at the start of a paragraph or <em> around italic words. You can leave them in while you're reviewing, or use Find and Replace in Word to clear them out once you've chosen the posts you want.

Are my photos included?

No, the export file holds the text of your posts and links to your images, not the images themselves. If you need the pictures too, download them from your media library, or ask us and we can help.

What about comments from readers?

Comments are part of the export file, so the conversations that grew around your posts are there too if you want to keep them.

My blog is very old or very large. Will it still work?

Yes. A blog with years of posts produces a bigger file, but it's still one file and one upload. If your site is no longer online and you only have an old backup .xml, that works just the same.

Would you rather we did it for you?

If you'd like your posts handed back as one clean document, in date order, with the formatting codes removed and ready to start editing, send us your export file and tell us what you're working on. We'll quote a small one-off fee.

Get my posts as one document

Moving your blog to a new platform rather than collecting your writing? See WordPress to Ghost or WordPress to Webflow.