Website Recovery Importer takes a recovery package (a WXR file plus the site’s images) and imports it into your WordPress site. It is designed for the packages produced by Tesora from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it will import any package that follows the same simple layout (a manifest.json, one or more wxr/part-*.xml files, and a media/ folder).
Important: this plugin does not crawl or scrape the Wayback Machine itself. It imports a package that was prepared beforehand. It just does the WordPress side — reliably and safely.
What it does:
- Bulk import in batches via AJAX, so large sites don’t hit PHP time or memory limits.
- Everything as DRAFT by default — you review before anything goes live. It never auto-publishes.
- Sanitizes third-party HTML with an explicit
wp_ksesallow-list — scripts, iframes and inline event handlers are stripped, regardless of your role. - Places the images and keeps the content pointing at them.
- Rewrites internal links from the old domain to your site, for every host variant (http/https, with/without www).
- Page vs post respected from the package, with a switch to force everything to Pages or Posts.
- Idempotent — re-importing the same package updates instead of duplicating (stable per-page identity).
- Two ways in — upload the package as a ZIP, or drop it by FTP into
wp-content/uploads/tesora-import/.
The content comes from third parties (archived pages). Review copyright, trademarks and content before publishing. You use it at your own responsibility — which is exactly why everything lands as a draft.
Screenshots
Upload a recovery package (ZIP). The import screen with the English / Spanish switch and the light/dark theme toggle.
Package preview before importing: the detected domain and how many pages and images were found.
Batch import in progress, with a live progress bar and a Stop button.
Everything is created as a draft — nothing is published without your review.
Dark mode.