Before You Bulk-Import Word Documents: Back Up and Check Your Disk Space

You have a folder of 100 Word documents, the settings are right, and the import button is one click away.

Two things are worth five minutes before that click: a backup of the whole site, and a look at how much disk space the import is about to use. Neither is about the import tool going wrong. Both are about what a hundred documents do to a site at once.

What a bulk import changes

One post a week changes a site slowly. A bulk import changes it in one go:

• A hundred new posts in the database, with categories, tags, authors and SEO fields.
• Every image in every document uploaded to the Media Library. WordPress then makes several resized copies of each, so one picture becomes five to ten files.
• Whatever you changed to get ready: a new category structure, a new custom post type, new permalinks.

DocxToWP Pro can roll back a whole import in one click. It trashes exactly the posts that import created, tracked by ID. That covers a batch that came out wrong. It does not cover the rest of the site, and it is not a backup.

Check 1: A full backup, files and database

Take a full backup before the first batch: the files and the database, because the import writes to both.

If you do not already have a backup plugin, BackupScope is free on WordPress.org. One Full Backup scans the site first so you can see what will be included and how big it is, backs up large sites step by step so server time limits do not stop it, and verifies the archive before it counts it as done.

Two habits make that backup worth having:

• Download it. A backup that lives on the same server is no help if the server is the problem.
• Keep it until you have checked the imported posts, not only until the import finishes. Formatting or link problems often show up days later, when someone actually reads the posts.

Check 2: How much room does the import have?

Most of a bulk import's size is images, and it is easy to underestimate. Ten documents with three photos each is thirty originals and up to three hundred resized files.

Before you start, find out two numbers:

1. How much space the site uses now, and how much of that is media.
2. How much free space the server or hosting plan has.

BackupScope Storage Insights is a free, read-only plugin that answers the first one: an overview chart of media, plugins, themes, the database and stored backups, details per folder and table, and the largest files. It changes nothing on the site. Run it once before the import, and once after. The second analysis shows exactly how much the import added.

If the free space is tight, sort that out first: delete old backup archives left on the server, or make the images in the documents smaller (see below). Running out of disk halfway through an import is a worse problem than any formatting issue.

Make the documents lighter first

Word keeps the full-size picture even when it shows it small. A photo pasted from a phone can be 4000 pixels wide. Two settings in Word fix most of it, for every picture in the file at once:

• File › Compress Pictures, choose Web (150 ppi).
• Tick Delete cropped areas of pictures, so cropped parts are not imported invisibly.

DocxToWP Pro can also convert JPEG and PNG images to WebP when the WebP is smaller, which makes the pages lighter for visitors. It keeps the original file on disk as well, so it is a page-speed feature, not a disk-space one.

Then import in batches

With the backup taken and the storage measured, run the import in batches of 20 to 50 documents and check a few posts from each batch before starting the next. The bulk import walkthrough shows each screen, and migrating a document archive covers the planning around it.

When the last batch is in and checked, take one more full backup. That is your new starting point.

The five-minute checklist

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Ready to run the import? Here is the bulk import walkthrough, screen by screen.