Import a Vox blog into WordPress (or almost anything else)

Six Apart is closing the doors on Vox, a blogging service they launched three and a half years ago. You have until September 30th to export your content from Vox, or you’ll lose access to it. Yikes!

They helpfully included a link to WordPress.com’s importer help page. WordPress.com has a Vox importer. What isn’t immediately obvious is that you can use WordPress.com as an intermediary on your way to a final destination. That is, you can import your Vox blog to a temporary WordPress.com blog, and then do an export from WordPress.com. Now you’ll have gold: a WordPress export file. You can take this file and import it into a standalone WordPress site, or a plethora of other blogging tools or services.

I recommend that everyone who has Vox content they want to save do this. Mark your WordPress.com blog as private if you don’t want that to be its final destination — just do it (and soon!) so that you have a copy of your site in a useful and portable format.

34 thoughts on “Import a Vox blog into WordPress (or almost anything else)”

    1. Because it’s faster, more reliable, highly available, backed up, free, etc. Vox users have less than four weeks before their content is gone. They need to take action now. Importing to WordPress.com is something that anyone can figure out how to do, and it is a safe staging ground for any final migration, which can now happen at the user’s leisure.

  3. That was so unfortunate of them. That’s it’s always safe to lodge your content in a more trusted service, that which you expect to last a lifetime.

    1. That would be self-hosting and ensuring you have multiple local backups, then. You can’t rely on any third-party service to ‘last a lifetime’. Companies get acquired or go bust, servers crash, people forget to renew domain names… I would have lost six months worth of archives on diary-x.com if I hadn’t manually saved them and copy/pasted them into a self-hosted WP install some years before the site went poof without warning. The internet is still far too young for anyone to start talking in terms of lifetimes.

  4. @Milan

    People can set up a blog at wp.com in a minute, but they cannot set up a standalone WP site in a minute, and they may not be interested in standalone WP. Or they may want to see what their options are first, and then decide what to do with their Vox content. In the meantime, their content can be safe in wp.com, either in a public blog or, as Mark says, in a private blog.

    1. I completely agree with you but Mark’s post was about use of WordPress.com as an intermediary for conversion to WordPress and because of that I left comment.

  9. Well that’s good to know, I haven’t used my Vox blog for a while now, I have been using standalone WordPress for quite some time now. I will be saving my Vox content though, thanks for the heads up!

  18. Thanks!
    But, when I try to import my Vox blog, it tells me that my username/password are incorrect (but they are not). Any idea what that’s all about? At this rate, my blog will be history!

    1. Ah, found the reply somewhere else. For anyone else who needs to know, the “user name” is actually the email address you used to originally set up the blog – not your user name.
      Thanks!

  24. It’s not often I reply to posts, but I will in this case. Thanks for the post. I look forward to reading more

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