How to most efficiently get 122 Wordpress articles into Webflow?

[adiggy (A)]

From what I’ve seen, there’s no importer that would get Wordpress blogs into Webflow, right? Well if that’s the case, what’s the most efficient way of getting 122 blogs (that are already styled with headings, subheadings, bold, italic, bullet points, etc.) into Webflow?

My initial idea was to copy and paste each article manually directly into Webflow which does seem to keep all the styling intact, but there must be an easier way to do this!

Here’s a screencast showing the simple copy and paste I’d have to do 122 times.
https://www.screencast.com/t/XeW8FTz62

Any ideas on how to speed up this workflow? Thanks webflowers!

[Syndicate15 (Douglas Mason Jr)]

Honestly I have nooo idea if this would work, truly. But everyone is talking about how Zapier can pass information into the webflow CMS. So I’m wondering, could you create a zap with Zapier that would create a webflow blog post from wordpress upon a wordpress publish? If so, theoretically; you would go into wordpress and just republish the blog posts and watch them populate into the Webflow CMS.

Again, this is just a crazy idea that came into my mind and I don’t know the first thing about how to create a zap or anything. I may be completely wrong.

Cheers

[jmw (John Moore Williams)]

Something important is coming to help you with that

[adiggy (A)]

Oh, your wordplay is like music to my ears, Mr. jmw. Soon?

[jmw (John Moore Williams)]

Haha, thanks @adiggy And yes, soon

[tomislavvv (Tom Tom)]

You can do that via Zapier, I’ve just recently made that with a little help of RSS feeds. Wordpress posts -> RSS -> Zapier -> Webflow collection. Works perfect!

[Kia (Kia Kamgar)]

Oh nice! Didn’t think of doing it that way, will try it out.

Cheers!

[adiggy (A)]

Oh wow I hadn’t even thought of zapier for this! Brilliant!

Would you mind explaining in just a bit more detail? When I select Wordpress after making a new Zap, it looks like all the triggers are when something new is created in Wordpress (new comment, new post, etc.) so how did you make it so a whole catalog of existing blog posts could be imported into webflow?

Thanks so much for the response, @tomislavvv!

Here’s a screenshot of the Wordpress triggers that come up:

[tomislavvv (Tom Tom)]

Hey @adiggy, I use Wordpress RSS only for generating new collection items, but take a look at this forum topic:

How to Batch Import Entries to Webflow CMS Using Zapier & Airtable (& maybe Postman)

I know the @webflow team is working hard on an import tool for the CMS, but if you’re impatient like me, there are ways to import all your content now using Zapier! It’s fairly laborious the first time you do it but if you’re familiar with Zapier (and the Webflow API), it shouldn’t take you too long. I got 153 entries imported start to finish from an old site in about 15 minutes. Here’s how: What You’ll Need Your database of entries (say, a Wordpress SQL dump) as a CSV file An Airtable account…

[sprockethouse (Nathan D Huening)]

In Webflow parlance, “soon” can be anywhere from next month to 3-4 years!

[sprockethouse (Nathan D Huening)]

Looks like @tomislavvv already linked you to my earlier forum article, but you’re right: the key is that you need a trigger for existing entries. Normally, it would be something like “publish Wordpress -> import to Webflow” but since they’re already published, you need something else.

In my example linked, I pulled the whole dump of articles from Wordpress (or wherever) as a CSV into an Airtable database. There, I “triggered” each entry by checking a box, which was a custom column / field I made for each record. So basically just run down the list checking the boxes, and when Zapier checks every 15 minutes for changes, it notices that a bunch of them have changed (been checked), and triggers an import.

Works like a charm! I did have an issue where the import stalled because it was moving so many items in the zap, thinking it was an error. But zapier sent me an email alerting me and I went in and manually approved the transfer, and it was fine.

[adiggy (A)]

Hey @tomislavvv and @sprockethouse! Thanks for chiming in! This is all super helpful!

I actually found an easier workaround that seems to work (at least I tried it on one sample article), which was to set up the Zapier trigger to be a newly published WP article, then go ahead and make all the articles I want to transfer over back to drafts, then toggle back to published and Zapier sees this as newly published and the transfer happens!

[jmw (John Moore Williams)]

This one’s definitely much more in the former bucket than the latter.

[sprockethouse (Nathan D Huening)]

That’ll work too! I didn’t realize “status” was one of the WP triggers (I never, ever use WP) but that approach definitely saves a few steps.

[brjohnson (Barrett Johnson)]

@adiggy We just launched CSV import - so this WordPress migration tutorial might come in handy! Let us know how it goes!

[jackluter]

The migrating of the plugin has more valued information in order to manage the website easily.

[adiggy (A)]

I saw that @brjohnson, thanks for the followup! Some of the database info I need to import over would require multi-reference fields (multiple authors & multiple categories per blog); since Webflow’s new import tool doesn’t include this, then the best way to do it would be to enter those sections manually, eh?

[brjohnson (Barrett Johnson)]

@adiggy That’s right - at the moment there’s no way for the imported content to “know” its relationship with other content in the CMS, so the reference fields will have to be configured manually.

[adiggy (A)]

I just used the import tool and it works like a CHARM. Love it! Nice job, guys.