The Tools → Export screen in WordPress looks like it does the whole job. It doesn't. The WXR file it produces contains your posts and pages, but it only references your images without including them, skips most plugin data, and knows nothing about your SEO metadata. If you export with the built-in tool alone and delete the old site, you have lost things you will want back. Here's how to export everything from WordPress, layer by layer.

Layer 1: Content — the WXR Export

Start with the standard export anyway; it's the best-supported format for content. Go to Tools → Export → All content, or use WP-CLI on the server for large sites: the wp export command avoids the browser timeouts that truncate big exports silently. The WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) file includes posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, custom fields, and navigation menus.

What WXR does not include, per WordPress's own design:

• The actual media files — only their URLs
• Theme and plugin settings
• Widget configuration and site options
• User passwords and roles beyond basic author attribution
• Custom post types, unless you export 'All content' rather than a filtered subset

Layer 2: Media — the Uploads Directory

Your images live in wp-content/uploads, organized in year/month folders. Grab the entire directory over SFTP, or zip it on the server first (much faster for libraries in the gigabytes). Two details matter for the destination platform:

• WordPress generates multiple sizes of every upload (thumbnail, medium, large). You usually only need the originals — the full-size file without dimensions in the filename.
• Post content references images by absolute URL. Whatever imports your content needs to rewrite those URLs or fetch the files — verify which one your target CMS does, because broken images are the most common post-migration bug.

Layer 3: SEO Metadata — the Part Everyone Forgets

Your titles and meta descriptions from Yoast, Rank Math, or All in One SEO are not in the standard export in any usable form. They live in the postmeta database table with plugin-specific keys (Yoast uses _yoast_wpseo_title and _yoast_wpseo_metadesc). Losing them means every page starts from scratch on meta descriptions — a real ranking risk on top of the migration itself, as we cover in what happens to your SEO when you migrate off WordPress.

Three ways to get SEO data out, in order of reliability:

• A direct SQL query against postmeta, exported to CSV and mapped to the new platform's SEO fields
• The SEO plugin's own export tool, where it has one (Yoast's export covers settings, not per-post data — check before relying on it)
• A migration tool or importer that reads the plugin keys natively

Layer 4: Users and Authors

WXR carries authors as attribution on posts, but not full user accounts — and passwords are hashed with WordPress-specific schemes the new platform probably won't accept. Export the users table (or Users → All Users with a plugin) to preserve names, emails, and bios, and plan for everyone to set a new password on the new system. For most marketing sites this is five accounts; for multi-author publications it's worth a spreadsheet mapping old author IDs to new byline entries.

Layer 5: The Full Database Dump — Your Insurance Policy

Finally, take a complete mysqldump of the database, even though you may never open it. It's the only export that contains everything: form entries, WooCommerce orders, comments awaiting moderation, plugin tables. Six months after migration, when someone asks about a testimonial that used to be on the old site, the dump answers questions no WXR file can. Store it with the uploads backup and keep both for at least a year.

A Worked Example

A typical 300-post blog export looks like this: one WXR file (~15 MB), the uploads directory (2–10 GB), a CSV of SEO metadata (300 rows), a users CSV (a handful of rows), and a database dump. That's the complete raw material for the import step — which is where the full migration checklist picks up. If EmDash is the destination, the WordPress to EmDash migration guide shows the import side of this exact process, and the plugin equivalents guide covers what replaces the plugins whose data you just exported.