ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) is a popular custom field plugin widely used by website developers who use WordPress. One of the features offered by ACF is the ability to export a custom field group on a website and export it to another website.
The feature is especially helpful if you often create the same website type for your clients as you don’t need to create the custom field group from scratch. You can export a custom field group you created on a certain site for recurring use, on different projects. This will save you a lot of time to get a new project done.
How to Export an ACF Field Group
To export a custom field group in ACF, first, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Custom Fields -> Tools. On the left column (the Export Field Groups column), select the field groups you want to export (you can select multiple field groups at once) and click the Export File button.
ACF will export your custom field groups into JSON files.
How to Import an ACF Field Group
To import an ACF field group, login to the WordPress dashboard on the website you want to import the ACF field group to and go to Custom Fields -> Tools. On the right column (the Import Field Groups column), click the Choose File button to select the JSON file of the field group you want to import and click the Import File button.
Once the field group is successfully imported, go to Custom Fields -> Field Groups. You should see the newly imported field group here. To edit it, you can hover your mouse over it and click the Edit link.
If you are new to ACF and have no idea how to create a custom field group yet, you can read our previous article to learn how to create custom fields with ACF.
We also have an article that covers how to display the data of an ACF field on a page.
