Convert your Typepad blog to WordPress by exporting your Typepad content in Movable Type format, then importing it into WordPress using the Import tool. After importing, check formatting, fix internal links, and set up redirects to preserve SEO. Finally, customize your WordPress theme to match your branding.
Your Typepad Blog Has a History. Let’s Give It a Future.
Your Typepad blog isn’t just a website; it’s a journal, a portfolio, a community you built from scratch. You remember choosing the name, writing that very first post, and the thrill of seeing comments from strangers who connected with your words. It’s been your digital home for years.
But you’ve started to feel the walls closing in. The internet has raced ahead, and you know that to grow and truly own your content, a move to a more powerful platform like WordPress is the next logical step.
The thought of moving it feels like packing up your home—exciting, but also terrifying. You’ve probably seen guides that make it sound as easy as “export, import, done.” If only it were that simple. This isn’t one of those guides. This is an honest conversation about what it really takes to move your digital home without breaking your most precious possessions.
The Real Stakes: More Than Just a Website
A flawless migration is about protecting your legacy. WordPress is the undisputed leader for a reason—it offers total creative freedom, powerful tools for growth, and a future-proof platform. But the path from a legacy system like Typepad, which has all but stopped evolving, is riddled with hidden traps.
One wrong move doesn’t just result in a technical glitch; it can mean lost content, broken memories, and years of hard-earned search engine authority vanishing overnight.
The DIY Migration Journey: A Story in Three Acts
What seems like a straightforward weekend project can quickly turn into a frustrating, week-long nightmare. Here’s how it usually unfolds.
Act I: The Hopeful Beginning (The Export File)
You log into your Typepad dashboard, navigate to Settings > Import/Export, and click the button. A neat little text file downloads. It feels like progress! You’ve successfully packed up your content.
But here’s the devastating secret that first file hides: it’s an incomplete package. It contains your words and comments, but your images—all those visual stories—have been left behind. The file only contains links pointing back to their old home on Typepad’s servers, a home you’re about to abandon.
Act II: The Heartbreak (The Image Crisis)
You run the WordPress importer, feeling optimistic. Your text appears, but your site is a graveyard of broken image icons. This is the moment most DIY migrations grind to a heartbreaking halt. Your website, once vibrant and visual, now looks abandoned and unprofessional.
You might try a plugin that promises to find and import the images for you. These plugins promise the world, but often choke on large sites, time out, or simply give up, leaving you with a random assortment of images and no idea which ones are missing. You’re now faced with a soul-crushing choice: spend weeks manually saving and re-uploading every single image from every single post, or leave your new site looking broken.
Act III: The Silent Killer (The SEO Catastrophe)
For years, you’ve built a relationship with Google. Readers find you through search because Google trusts your site and knows where every page lives. A botched migration severs that connection instantly.
You need to tell search engines that oldsite.com/my-post has permanently moved to newsite.com/my-post. This is done with “301 redirects.” Getting them wrong is catastrophic. It involves editing complex server files like .htaccess, where a single misplaced comma can crash your entire site, showing visitors nothing but an error screen. Without a perfect, one-to-one map for every single post, Google assumes your content has vanished, and your rankings can evaporate in days.
Migration Reality Check: How a Weekend Project Unravels
| Migration Step | The DIY Experience | The Professional Path |
| Export Content | You hit ‘export,’ feeling good, not realizing your images have been left behind and your formatting is about to be scrambled. | We perform a full content audit first, treating the export file as just the starting point for a comprehensive data rescue plan. |
| Prepare WordPress | You grab a basic hosting plan and a free theme, unknowingly creating a slow and insecure foundation for your new home. | We set you up on a performance-optimized hosting environment with a premium, secure framework built for growth. |
| Import to WordPress | You cross your fingers and run the importer, only to find a mess of garbled text and broken layouts that need hours of fixing. | We import everything to a private staging server first, then run custom scripts to meticulously clean and reformat your content. |
| Fix Images | You face weeks of soul-crushing manual work, re-uploading every image by hand or battling plugins that keep failing. | We use powerful, custom scripts to seamlessly migrate every single image, relink them, and verify nothing was lost. |
| Check Links/Permalinks | You try a simple plugin for redirects, missing dozens of link variations and unknowingly telling Google to forget about you. | We engineer a bulletproof 301 redirect strategy, often with advanced server rules, to protect 100% of your SEO authority. |
| Review and Clean Up | You spot-check a few posts and think it’s fine, missing hundreds of broken internal links pointing back to your old Typepad site. | We conduct a link-by-link, page-by-page audit to fix every internal link and polish every detail for a flawless user experience. |
| Test and Launch | You launch the site, only to have readers email you about broken pages and weird formatting on their phones. | We perform a rigorous, multi-point inspection on the private staging site before launching, ensuring a perfect debut. |
The Tough Questions That Stop Migrations in Their Tracks
These are the real-world complexities where expert help becomes essential.
What about my private posts? Will they stay private?
It’s a scary thought, but the standard import process makes them all public. Imagine your private journal entries suddenly appearing on the front page. A professional migration involves running custom database scripts to find and re-secure every single private post before you go live.
How do I fix all my old embedded videos and audio clips?
Legacy embed codes from Typepad will almost certainly break. Fixing them means running a precise search-and-replace operation directly in the website’s database—a high-stakes procedure where a small mistake can corrupt your entire content library.
I used a subdomain for my Typepad blog. How do I avoid breaking everything?
This is an SEO minefield. Moving from blog.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com requires advanced server and DNS configurations. Getting it wrong means not only will your old links be broken, but your entire domain authority could be reset to zero.
Can I bring my email subscribers with me?
Typepad’s subscription tools are a locked box. Migrating your audience requires carefully exporting a list of emails (if possible) and correctly importing them into a new system like Mailchimp or Jetpack, all while communicating the change to your readers so they don’t feel spammed.
How can I be sure everything works before I launch?
The only safe way is to build and test everything on a private staging server—a complete, working copy of your new site that nobody else can see. This is standard practice for professionals but is often overlooked in DIY guides, leading to a messy and public launch day.
Your Blog is Too Important to Risk
Your blog is more than just data. It’s your voice, your history, and years of your hard work. Hiring an expert to handle your migration isn’t just another expense; it’s an investment in peace of mind. It’s about protecting the asset you’ve spent years building.
Let a professional handle the technical heavy lifting—the image rescues, the redirect mazes, and the database deep-dives. You get to skip the weeks of frustration and anxiety, and instead focus on what you love: planning the exciting future of your blog in its new, powerful home.
