How to Import Your WordPress Blogroll or Links From One Site to Another

Under Tools in the WordPress settings are the import and export options. This can be really useful when you are moving a blog from one location to another or if you are moving a WordPress.com hosted blog to a self-hosted one.

The export/import feature, however, does not include your blogroll. If you have a large one it can be very tedious to recreate.

But, there is a way, to transfer the blogroll so it doesn’t have to be recreated manually.

In your WordPress installation is a file called wp-links-opml.php. This opml file contains all of your blogroll data.

Here’s how you can obtain the info.

1. In your web browser go to the site that has the blogroll that you want and include the name of the opml file at the end of the URL. For example, http://www.you-site.com/wp-links-opml.php
2. You will see an ugly XML file in your browser that looks similar to the following:
   
3. Save this as a text file. It MUST be a .txt file to import properly. You can go to File > Save Page As in your browser (Firefox). Name the file and put .txt as the file extension and change Save As Type to All Files. You can also highlight the text, copy to the clipboard, paste into a text editor and save as a .txt file.
4. So now that you have the links saved in a text file, go to your new blog and in WordPress go to Tools > Import.
5. Select Blogroll, which is the 2nd choice.
   
6. Choose From Local Disk. Locate the saved text file on your hard drive.
7. Here is the one downside to this. You can select a Category for your links, if you even use that feature, but you can only choose one. So, if you were using multiple link categories, you will still need to do this part manually. But, at least everything didn’t have to be done manually.
8. And that’s it. You’ve moved your blogroll from one blog to another. As I mentioned this is very useful for those moving from a WordPress.com blog as they don’t have direct access to the database.

Yay! Less typing that recreating all of the link data manually.

photo credit: Laundry Broad

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