WordPress is the most used CMS in the world for publishing one’s own site, blog or e-commerce and it is in continuous evolution and expansion.
This diffusion of WordPress is caused both by the enormous plugin and theme marketplace that increases the functionalities of the WordPress site to fit all needs that a person or a company may have as well as from the simplicity of use of the system in all its parts.
The possibility of continuously adding plugins and new features makes some operations not entirely simple to do. For example, if I need to import the updated product inventory from the site or have to import a list of emails to be inserted into the site’s newsletter, one always has to perform acrobatic jumps to get the desired result in a simple and effortless way.
To avoid lengthy manual insertion procedures or having incorrect data on the site (since even copy-pasting can go wrong) it is necessary to have a simple, fast and efficient system to make the import painless. To do this we use and strongly recommend WP All Import, a complete and professional plugin that allows importing data in various ways and with different rules and multiple modes (some of these are available in the premium version).
What can I import with WP All Import?
It is possible to import from Xml, CSV and some Excel formats (in the premium version of the plugin) the data independently from their formatting within the file and it is possible to structure them so that WordPress can use them correctly at a later time. This entails both the possibility of using custom fields to add missing fields on WordPress and the possibility of discarding some “columns” of data during export in order to keep only the data actually needed by WordPress.
The import and all the various related operations are performed with a convenient drag and drop graphical interface that allows mapping the incoming data (all or part of the input fields) to the WordPress data structures in which it is installed. Configurations of the input fields can also be saved for reuse when needed or to prepare various forms of imports based on which fields I want to import for the work that needs to be done.
Note that it is possible to use the drop interface to upload multiple files that have the same structure and can be processed all together.
Explained like this, it may seem a complicated thing or an instrument that finds few opportunities to be used, but perhaps a practical example could be clearer and show the potential of the tool.
Take, for example, Anna’s problem:
Anna has an old site built with unknown/disused technologies that contains some recipes. These recipes are exportable in a CSV without issues but WordPress natively does not support CSV and therefore they should be manually transcribed into the new WordPress site which has recipes as Custom Post Type.
This means hours and hours of data transcription in the Custom Post Type that can lead to errors and take too much time compared to the actual time needed for import if the right tools are used.
Instead Anna follows Bob’s advice to find a plugin that does the work for her. So Anna finds WP All Import and starts importing the old site’s data (users, articles, recipes, and everything she needs). Through the graphical interface Anna maps the CSV values to the fields of the Custom Post Type on her new site and in 2 minutes all the recipes are imported into the new site.
This example shows how extremely easy it is to add new contents with WP All Import but this is not the only possibility. Setting up the import correctly is also possible to make massive changes to existing data, updating all fields of imported data in just a few seconds. This is extremely useful, for instance, in keeping any product catalog on the site updated in case of an ecommerce or a showcase site with all the products of the activity.
Can I import the data multiple times?
If you wish, you can import data multiple times with WP All Import on the same WordPress site and this can be done in various ways. You can do it manually but through the plugin settings, you can configure imports with a scheduling and thus re-run the import at a specific date/time or set a cron (available only in the pro version) from URL (even with HTTP authentication) or other sources. This function can be useful for setting up a synchronization system that allows keeping the WordPress site always updated with the latest data from other sources.
But isn’t it dangerous?
Yes, the massive import of data is a delicate operation that should be done knowing what one has, what one is doing and what one wants to obtain at least in the moment of initial configuration of the thing.
Therefore, even if the tool is extremely easy to use, the delicate part is choosing the correct fields on the input file and site data sides, and it would be good to have an idea of how WordPress works.
