Widget Importer & Exporter icon

Widget Importer & Exporter

by Steven Gliebe

View on WordPress.org
85 Quality Score
Active Installs
24/30

With 200,000 active installs and a score of 79 out of 30, the plugin is well established and used far more heavily than its raw install count suggests on a per-capita basis.

Update Freshness
25/25

Maintenance scored a perfect 100 out of 25, reflecting a recent update on 2026-05-23 that keeps the plugin current with WordPress 7.0 compatibility.

User Rating
14/15

A 94 out of 100 rating from 117 users indicates strong, consistent satisfaction with how the plugin performs its narrow job.

Support Health
8/15

Support health is the weak spot at 50 out of 15, driven by 0 support threads opened and 0 resolved, which suggests either very few issues or a lack of an active support channel.

WP Compatibility
15/15

Compatibility scored 100 out of 15, requiring only WordPress 3.5 and PHP 5.2.4, which means it will run on essentially any WordPress environment in use today.

Scores higher than 96% of indexed plugins

About

Import and export your widgets.

Active Installs 200k+
Rating ★★★★½ 4.7/5
Last Updated 2026-05-23 10:54pm GMT
Requires WordPress 3.5+
Tested Up To 7.0.4
Requires PHP 5.2.4+
✓ No known vulnerabilities

What It Does

Widget Importer & Exporter lets you save your site's widget configuration as a single .wie file and restore it on another WordPress installation, preserving which widgets appear in which widget areas. It handles sidebars, footers, and other registered widget zones, making it useful when you want identical widget setups across staging and production, or when handing a site to a client.

Who It's For

This plugin is best for developers and agencies who routinely move widget layouts between WordPress sites, whether during theme switches, multisite rollouts, or client handoffs. It also suits site owners doing a one-off migration or template duplication who need a reliable way to reproduce sidebar and footer widget arrangements without rebuilding them by hand.

Who Should Skip It

If you are not moving widgets between sites, or if you are already using a full site migration tool that includes widget export, you do not need this plugin. Sites running custom block-based themes with no legacy widget areas will also get little value from it.

The Bottom Line

Widget Importer & Exporter does one thing and does it well, with a high user rating, recent updates, and broad compatibility that justify its 85.34 overall quality score. The lack of visible support activity is the only real concern, though it also reflects how rarely users run into problems. If you need to move widget setups between WordPress sites, this remains a dependable, lightweight choice.

Tags

exporter import importer widget widgets