If you’ve ever had three weeks of content edits sitting on a staging site while production carried on without you, you’ll know that getting one into the other is rarely as simple as it should be.
The native WordPress exporter handles posts, pages and taxonomies well enough, but it leaves ACF repeater fields as serialised text and ignores WooCommerce orders completely, so most of us end up falling back on a database dump that brings everything across whether we wanted it or not.
Import Export by RockStarLab handles the usual imports and exports across WordPress content types, and it adds a sync layer that moves selected content straight from one install to another, which is the part that makes it interesting for anyone juggling more than one environment.
What Import Export by RockStarLab Covers
The list of what it can move is broad, taking in posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies, menus, comments and users. Then, on the WooCommerce side, it covers products, orders, refunds, coupons, attributes, reviews and customers. Files go in and out as CSV, XLSX, JSON, XML or ODS, so you can work in a spreadsheet, or in JSON if you’re scripting around it.
What I’d pay closer attention to is the mapping, because that’s where most import tools quietly fail at times. Import Export reads the data structures used by ACF and ACF PRO, Elementor, Yoast SEO, Rank Math and WooCommerce, so those fields arrive on the other site attached to the right posts rather than turning up as loose meta you have to piece back together yourself.
ACF support goes as far as repeaters and flexible content fields, which will mean something to anyone like me who’s tried to move a flexible content layout between two installs and found the structure didn’t survive the trip.
Where Import Export Fits in Your Stack
It’s worth being clear that this isn’t a replacement for your migration plugin. A migration plugin moves an entire site in one go and overwrites whatever was on the destination, which is exactly what you want when you’re launching a rebuild.
Import Export is for the situation where both sites need to keep running, so you choose whether to sync everything or only certain parts, and anything you didn’t select stays exactly as it was on the target site.
For an agency, that means content approved on staging can go live without a database swap taking out the orders and signups that came in that morning. Store owners can pull product data into a spreadsheet, edit it there and push it back, which beats working through variations one at a time in the WooCommerce admin. Developers get to pull a real content set down to local so they’re testing against something that resembles the live site instead of a handful of dummy posts.
The Features Worth a Closer Look
The sync runs without generating files at all, so rather than exporting a CSV on one site and uploading it on the other, you connect the two installs and move the content directly between them.
Paired with the scheduling built into the plugin, that turns a staging to production sync into something that runs on a timer instead of something you keep meaning to get round to, and the jobs log keeps a record of what ran and when.
The AI URL Importer is the feature that caught my attention early on. You give it a URL or a list of them, choose whether the result should become a post, a page or a custom post type, and tell it what to pull out of the source page, then map the extracted values to the post title, content, excerpt, featured image, taxonomy terms or ACF fields.
There’s a preview step before anything gets written to the database, and if you’re working through a long list you can set a delay between URLs to stay within OpenAI’s rate limits, since it runs on your own API key rather than the vendor’s credits.
Two smaller features are also worth knowing about, mostly because they solve problems that have nothing to do with migration. Any folder you’ve uploaded over FTP or SFTP can be registered into the media library, so those files stop being invisible to WordPress, and you can export a list of every URL on the site, which gives you a starting point for an SEO audit, a redirect map before a rebuild, or a content inventory when you inherit a site that nobody documented.
Pricing and Licensing
The free version on WordPress.org covers more ground than most free tiers in this category, including posts, pages, comments, media file data, the URL export, the FTP and SFTP media library sync, multilingual support, the AI URL Importer and site-to-site sync.
The premium version picks up the rest of the data types along with the bulk editing tools, so custom post types, taxonomy terms, menus, users and MySQL table fields sit there, as do the Content Updater and the data transformation tool for changing content during or after an import. Every WooCommerce data type is PRO as well, including orders on WooCommerce 8.0 and above.
Pricing is by site count, with a monthly or annual option on each tier:
- 3 sites: $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year
- 10 sites: $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year
- 100 sites: $49.99 per month or $399.99 per year
There’s also currently a limited lifetime deal at $99.99 for four sites, which works out at the same one-off cost as a single year on the 10-site plan and makes sense if you’re confident you’ll keep using it.
New users get every PRO feature free for the first month with no credit card required, which is long enough to check whether the mapping handles your field structures before spending anything.
The current rates are launch prices with a lock on them, so later increases won’t affect your plan while the subscription stays active. WP Mayor readers have a coupon on top of that, with WPMAYOR30 taking 30% off annual plans, which brings the three-site tier to just under $21 for the year.
Is Import Export a Good Fit for You?
If you run more than one environment per project and moving content between them is a regular part of your week, Import Export by RockStarLab is worth looking at properly, and the same goes for WooCommerce stores whose catalogues live half in spreadsheets and ACF-heavy sites where standard exports fall apart.
If you run a single site and migrate it once every few years, the free version on its own will probably cover you, since both the sync and the URL export are included there.
Are you going to try Import Export on your next staging to production push?
