Restructuring WordPress Content Data (aka Converting from a Visual Page Builder)

Owned by Steve Puddick (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 05, 2023 by Jeff Hebert
2 min read

It is common for a WordPress website to use a third party ‘site builder’ type plugin. These types of plugins add an additional layer on top of WordPress. It allows website editors to create advanced looking layouts and functionality without touching any code or requiring any deep knowledge in web development. These types of plugins are very popular since it allows non technical users to do things that would typically require a web developer. This approach to website building does comes at a cost:

  • CSS, template code, and content are all mixed together. It makes maintaining a consistent staging, dev, and production site very difficult.

  • It makes it difficult or impossible to use version control with these projects

  • It is very hard to use advanced web development concepts and tools like Sass, linting

  • It can be very difficult to find where CSS or other page elements are coming from

  • It can be very difficult to add future functionality since styling, content, and templates are all tangled together

If starting a new Kalamuna WordPress project involving the rebuilding of an existing WordPress website using one of these ‘page builder’ type plugins, it would be best to extract the content from these plugins and reformat it into the regular WordPress content structure. This can be done using the following process:

  1. Deactivate the page builder plugin. Usually the plugin has hooks that run on deactivation that refactor the page builder content into a somewhat usable format, in the standard WordPress content area. In other cases parts of the page content will remain hidden in meta data.

  2. Utilize the ‘WP All Export’ WordPress plugin (A premium plugin which Kalamuna already has a license for). Upload and install this plugin.

  3. Follow the process for exporting posts. ‘Cherry pick’ the appropriate fields to include in the export file. It is ok if the content fields are separate at this point. They can be combined during the import process if needed. This process also has the nice side effect of only selecting the necessary media to import into the new site

  4. On the local or staging site for the new build install and activate the ‘WP All Import’ plugin (Kalamuna also has a license for this). Upload the export file and group the content fields as needed

  5. Once the content has been imported some minor adjustments may still be needed to work with the page structure of the new theme, but at this point the site content, along with media has been extracted from the page builder and is now in the standard WordPress content format

Arguably at this time of writing (October 2021) the core WordPress Gutenberg blocks are making these site builder plugins obsolete.

Some examples of common page builder plugins include: