Moving Your Blog from Typepad to WordPress

As with many new things – I have had a lot of learning experiences over the past few days making the move from Typepad to WordPress. It is amazing what you can learn from just a single experience! Making sure your blog is properly preserved when changing platforms can be a bit of a challenging task. I’ll let you learn from my mistakes here and save you the hours of troubleshooting I just went through.

While there is some documentation about how to do this online – it seems to be scattered in a million different places. I will provide you with a step-by-step guide to moving your blog so if some day you decide to take the plunge – you’ll know what you are getting into.

First – don’t move your blog from Typepad to WordPress unless you are comfortable with HTML, CSS, and some PHP. If you don’t know any of these three terms – or if one of them scares the heck out of you I would stick with Typepad for now. If you’re a web guru and occassionally dream in PHP then WordPress will definitely offer the customization options you’ve probably been looking for.

So you have a Typepad blog and want to move it to Wordress – follow these steps below for a smooth transition.

1) Start with exporting your current content from Typepad. This will give you a single file with all of your post data in it that can be read by WordPress. To do this simply navigate to your blog and select the “Manage” tab. On the far right you will see a link for “Import/Export”. (See image below)

Typepad Import/Export

2) Next you will click on the link labeled “Export: Your_Blog_Name“. This will export your blog as a single text file – Save this – you’ll need it soon.

3) Now login to your WordPress account and from the Dashboard select “Tools” -> “Import” and you will see the following screen:

Wordpress Import

4) Select “Movable Type or Typepad” and the following page will prompt you for the MT Export file. Simply select the file you just exported from Typepad and your posts will be automatically imported into WordPress.

5) Now you have your old blog content stored in WordPress – but you’re not done yet! Next you need to make sure that any sites linking to your blog will be able to correctly access your new posts. In most cases this means updating your RSS feed URL with your feed service – I use FeedBurner. In the case of WordPress you can access your feed at any of the following URLS:

http://your_blog.com/wp-rss.php
http://your_blog.com/wp-rss2.php
http://your_blog.com/wp-rdf.php
http://example.com/wp-atom.php

If you don’t update this with your feed aggregator everyone linking to your posts will now have nothing but broken links. Take it from someone who made this mistake and don’t
forget this important step!

6) Almost done – the last step you need to take is to ensure that your Blog Address URL is correct. When you are working on your blog (i.e. before switching over) there is a good chance that your Blog URL and WordPress URL will be the same. When you want to launch your blog you’ll want to update your Blog URL to match the domain name for your blog – otherwise your posts will all be located at the URL of the root domain hosting WordPress.

To make this change simply go to “Settings” -> “General Settings”. You will most likely want to keep the WordPress URL the same (I wouldn’t expect you to suddenly change your WordPress directory) but change your Blog URL to the domain your blog is hosted on.

This means that your posts will now be located at the correct domain name and make any partner sites linking to your blog happy!

That’s it! If you follow the steps above you can make a smooth, painless transition from Typepad to WordPress.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any specific questions about this process! Have a great Tuesday night and Happy Flipping!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton