WordPress comes with built-in import/export functionality that allows you to import or export your WordPress posts in XML format. When moving your site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org and in other transfer scenarios, sometimes these export files are larger than your web host's upload limit. In those cases, you really have two options. You can ask your WordPress web host to increase your maximum upload limit. The second option is to simply split your large XML files into several smaller files, so you can upload them one by one. In this article, we will show you how to split large XML files in WordPress.
Although you can manually split your large XML files, create multiple XML files with the same header, category, and footer information and split the rest of the elements. But who has time for that? There are really nice free tools that allow you to split your XML files with just a few clicks.
For Windows users, there is a tool called WordPress WXR File Splitter. Download and run this utility. When you run this program, you will see a screen like this:
Click the Open WXR File button to open your WordPress XML file. This tool will then read your XML file and show you useful information about the data it contains. It will get the header, footer and show you the number of elements in the file.
You can adjust the size limit to split your large file into smaller ones. Alternatively, you can provide the number of files you want it to be split into. Either way, the goal is to make the files small enough, so you can upload them to your host without going over the limits. Finally, when you're ready, hit the Split Files button, which will split the files and store them in the same folder as your original WordPress XML file.
For all Mac users, you are not left out. There is a similar WordPress WXR splitter utility available for Mac users. It does the same thing, it splits the large XML file into smaller file sizes.
We hope this article helped you split your large WordPress XML files, so you can import them into your WordPress. Let us know if you have any questions by leaving a comment below.
