Generating Weebly xml file for export to WordPress (without Google Reader)

I recently helped a client move from Weebly to self-hosted WordPress, and in doing so discovered how to make the move slightly less painful now that Google Reader is no more.

I’m indebted to this WPBeginner tutorial for the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Before Google shut down Reader, steps two and three of the above-linked tutorial worked great. Now, I have yet to find a reader which will display more than 10 posts. So, here’s my hacky way of making it work.

Go to your site’s feed (generally at yoursite.com/1/feed or something similar).

Copy everything but the top line (start from the rss tag)

Paste that text into a text editor (NOT Microsoft Word) and save the file as blogposts.xml in a place you can find easily.

Now for the part that will make your palms sweat:

(This is where you start the repeating process)

You’ve got to go and delete the first 10 posts from your blog. Do this in a different tab from the RSS feed. Weebly’s web interface will warn you about never getting them back, and they are right. You won’t ever get them back in Weebly. Make sure that you’ve got all of their content saved in the xml file, and you will get them back in WordPress.

Once you’ve deleted those first 10 posts, refresh the page that is viewing your feed, and copy everything from the first “item” tag all the way to the end of all the “item” tags.

Once you’ve got all those posts saved, return to the beginning of the repeating process and repeat until there are no posts left in your feed. Make sure to save the .xml file each time.

(end of repeating process)

This method gets you the .xml file needed to import into WordPress. Continue the other tutorial from here.

If you aren’t comfortable with the process, I’m more than happy to execute this portion of your move for you. My rate is variable, based on the complexity of your setup. Contact me below to get started.