How to Port Your Blog from TypePad to WordPress (Part 1)

This is Part 1 of a 2-part post on migrating your blog from TypePad to WordPress. Part 2 >>

While the information in this post uses TypePad as the subject. much is transferable to other platforms.

You’re reading this post for one of several possible reasons:

• You’re looking into moving your TypePad blog to a self-hosted WordPress version, and you want to know what to expect
• You’re in the process of moving your blog, and something isn’t going right or something appears a bit wonky
• You’ve already moved your blog, and you want to make sure you’ve dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s
• You like me and you’re bored

When Quick Migrations Get Ugly

I have good news and bad news for you. Migrating to WordPress is incredibly easy (for the most part). And for most people, it should be a relatively simple move, even if some parts can get rather tedious:

• If you’ve hacked TypePad with any custom styles, stripping out the remnants of those styles can be painful
• If you have a large number of posts, error checking can be tedious
• If your posts are thoroughly cross-linked, you’ll have to re-link them
• If you’ve used a lot of photos in your posts, you’ll have to re-reference them and create your own thumbnails

That was the good news. The bad news is that to minimize downtime, to make sure your feed is available to your readers, and to ensure that you maintain your page rank after the move, you will have to jump through some hoops. So the physical migration itself is easy — moving your content from one blog on one server to a new blog on another server — but attending to the other concerns is what could cause you some headaches. If you have a high page rank, and want to maintain it, you’ll have to jump through some hoops. If you want to minimize site and feed downtime, be prepared for a little extra work.

There are many other smaller considerations, but the above are what consumed most of my effort. At the risk of stating the obvious, you probably noticed that characteristics of larger, more active blogs lend themselves to the more difficult migrations. Even still, I wouldn’t expect the total migration time to exceed 15 to 20 hours. For smaller, simpler installations, 1 hour would seem like an eternity.

Another thing I’d like to point out before going further is that I’m assuming that you’re going to be transferring a domain name along with porting your blog. That is, your TypePad blog is available at http://yourblog.com, and it should maintain that address when the migration is complete. If you’re moving from http://youraccount.typepad.com to http://yourblog.com, then the process is far simpler, because you won’t need to worry about the DNS propagation lags. Of course, you’ll also lose any page rank (at least temporarily) that you’ve worked to achieve, so understand that before you go in.

Preparing for the Migration

Before you begin moving any posts, there are a few things you should attend to. Most of these seem obvious, and I only mention them because ignoring them could leave the door open to situations that you would much rather avoid. The below are related to troubleshooting that you might have to do during the port. There probably won’t be an issue, but if there is, you want to be able to quickly assign blame to the port, which means eliminating any other potential causes of conflict.

1. Make sure your new hosting account and platform are stable.

Load some test HTML and PHP pages, call them in a browser, and make sure they work. If you’re moving your domain, you’ll probably need to do this via a temporary URL or an IP address, because your domain is still pointing to your blog. Make sure you can access file system functions, like creating and moving folders and files, changing permissions, and so on.

2. Install WordPress on your hosting account

Similar to #1, make sure it’s installed and running smoothly. Again, if you’re moving your domain, you’ll probably need to call the WordPress installation script via a temporary URL or an IP address.

3. Apply your Themes, Plug-ins, and any Customizations

Make your blog look and behave as you want it to when the migration is complete. You want to make these changes now before your readers are looking at them. Apply your themes, modify your styles and pages, add your plug-ins, etc. I usually install Akismet, Wp-Cache, Simple Tags, All in One SEO, and Google XML Sitemaps right from the start.

4. Backup your WordPress Installation

Not just the database, but the entire installation. If there’s a problem, you want to be able to roll back immediately.

5. Gather your Account Information

This includes any IP addresses, account logins, domain registrar logins, etc. that you’ll need, or even might need if something goes wrong. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

6. Inventory your backlinks

Query Google and Yahoo! for any sites that link to you, and make note of those URL’s. Search Google and Yahoo’s indexes for links to your TypePad blog that you’ll want to redirect. You’ll want to do more than just using the typical “link:” searches. Also search for yourdomain.com without the link. I found plenty of unlinked URL’s that I wanted to redirect.

Exporting your Data from TypePad

This used to require a ticket to the support desk, but now you export all of your content directly from your TypePad control panel.

1. Login to TypePad and go to Weblogs | Manage | Import/Export.
2. At the bottom of the page, look for the “Export: Your-Blog-Name” link. If you’re using IE, right-click and Save as; otherwise, you can right-click and Save as or just open the link in your browser.
3. Save the file to your desktop with a .txt extension.

That’s it for the export. That file contains all of your posts, categories, comments, etc. Amazing how so much work can be pared down into such a small file, isn’t it?

Importing your Data into WordPress

Import is now even easier thanks to a wizard that’s available directly from the WordPress control panel.

1. Make sure the wp-content directory is writable.
2. Open your WordPress administrative panel, and go to Manage | Import.
3. Select the TypePad export file you downloaded, and click the button to upload it; or upload it with FTP and name it as described on this screen.
4. Follow the screen prompts.

That’s it for the import. For simple cases, all that would be left to do is redirect the traffic to the new location, but I’m going to continue on with the more complex scenario.

Clean up the Migration

Something to note here: your traffic is still being pointed to TypePad as you perform these clean-up steps!

1. Reorganize your Categories

When I moved to WordPress, I took the opportunity to reorganize my categories from the flat list I was using before, to a nested list. Doing so allows me to better organize my posts, present a more logical structure to readers, and take advantage of various themes that automatically create drop-down or fly-out menus.

An example of the logical structure is the Java category. With TypePad, I had the option of lumping all Java posts into one overall Java category, or creating three categories and assigning a post to one or more. With WordPress subcategories, I now have a parent Java category, with ME, EE, and SE subcategories. So all Java posts can be found in the Java category, but readers can further drill down to only read posts assigned to the specific Java edition that they want to see. Of course, I could do this with TypePad, but it would require four separate top-level categories, instead of just one. It’s neat and logical on WordPress.

2. Replace TypePad-specific URL’s

Cross-linking your posts is a recommended blogging tactic. It keeps your readers engaged in your posts, and encourages more browsing. But all of those cross-linked posts now point to old URL’s. You can just redirect them, of course, but it’s a better idea to change the links that you control. So scan all of your posts, look for any TypePad URL’s, and point them to your new blog URL’s.

3. Re-reference your Images

All of your images are stored on TypePad’s server, and they were not part of the data export, so you’ll need to manually move them to your WordPress installation. If you have them all on your PC, great. If not, grab the thumbnails and full-size images from your TypePad blog.

Hint: set Typepad to display 50 posts per page, and then use the Firefox add-on “DownThemAll” to download all images on a page in one fell swoop. If you’re not a Firefox user,  set Typepad to display 50 posts per page and then save the page as type “Web Page, complete.” Then all you need to do is sort the folder by type to grab all of the images.
There are several ways to proceed from here. If you’re the fullsize-image-in-the-post sort, you can just upload your images in bulk to the content folder, and then manually replace the image references in your posts. If you’re the thumbnail-and-link-to-the-full-size-image sort, you’re probably better off using a photo plugin like YAPB (Yet Another Photo Blog). It will automatically create and link thumbnails for you. You can use WordPress’s built-in thumbnail facility, but I find it a bit too inflexible to be useful.

Choose your poison and get it done. I found this step to be horribly tedious, as I relied heavily on TypePad’s image management facilities, so I resized all of my images (Fireworks batch process) prior to upload into WordPress. At least half of my migration time was spent doing this.

When you reference your images, replace TypePad’s absolute references with a relative reference from your server’s root, e.g. /wp-content/uploads/year/month/image.gif. This will assist with any changes in the future, and it will allow you to view the images as they’ll appear after you make your DNS changes.

4. Hacked styles

If you hacked any styles in TypePad, you’ll probably need to remove those hacks, and move them to the overall stylesheet in WordPress. I’ll admit, I haven’t cleaned this one up yet!

5. Update your 404 Page

Regardless of your efforts, expect that pesky 404 page to be getting at least a little bit of traffic over the coming weeks and months. Take this opportunity to make your 404 page very descriptive and helpful.

At the very least, tell people about the server move and link to your anchor articles. Informing them of the move doesn’t make it any less inconvenient for them, but you’re more likely to encourage the readers to stick around if you acknowledge and explain the error. Your anchor posts are probably driving most of your traffic, so it only makes sense to make sure that they are featured prominently on your 404 page. You can list their titles verbatim, or if they’re not very descriptive, add some keywords that describe their content to make it easy on people who were looking for something specific.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also list all of the new categories, and map the old categories to new ones, as well as provide links to your chronological archives.

6. Tag your Posts

This isn’t a necessary step, but I love the concept of tags, so I tagged any posts of mine that weren’t frivolous in nature. If there was content in a post, even if it was slight, it got tagged. I use Simple Tags for this.

7. SEO Anchor Pages and Posts

Like Step #6, because I can now SEO my pages, I’m going to do so. I don’t really care about any of my frivolous posts, but for any anchor post, or any post that gets Googled a lot, I want to make sure that I’m taking advantage of facilities that are accessible to me. I use the SEO All in One plugin for this purpose.

8. Replace Widgets

TypePad is a great platform, and they’ve made some really great strides with widgets in the past 6 to 12 months. Some widgets I’ve grown to love. So for those widgets that I liked, or that I thought readers liked, I made sure to find replacements for them in WordPress.

That should wrap-up the cleanup. Once this step is complete, you’re ready to move traffic from your TypePad blog to your shiny, new WordPress blog. Part 2 of this artciel covers DNS changes, redirecting your URL’s, updating your feeds, and wrapping up the migration.

Read Part 2 of this 2-part post on migrating your blog from TypePad to WordPress. Part 2 >>