One of the great things about switching to WordPress is that you can very easily import your old blogs. This post will cover how to import blogs from three platforms: Blogger (blogspot), TypePad, and WordPress.com. Together, these three types of blogs probably make up 95% of the blogs that people want to import into self-hosted WordPress blogs.

NOTE: after successfully importing an old blog, DO NOT delete that old blog. Just let it sit there. Your photos from your old blog are not actually moved over to your new blog, they are simply referenced by your new blog and must be left in place to display correctly.

For all three types, you start by going to “Manage” –> “Import” in your WP Admin area, which looks like this:

Importing a Blogger Blog:

If the blog you are importing is a blogger blog (i.e., ends with a .blogspot.com), follow these steps. (NOTE: if you have a blogger blog that was set up to publish via FTP or SFTP (fairly uncommon), see this post for info on how to get it imported.)

1. Open up your blog’s WordPress Admin area, and go to “Manage” –> “Import.”
2. Next, open another tab of your browser, or a new browser window, log in to your Blogger account. Make sure you are logged in and not just visiting your blogger blog.
3. Then, go back to your WordPress Admin area and click on the “Blogger” link, then click “Authorize.”
4. If you did step 2 right, you should see a screen that looks like this:
5. Click to grant access, and then you will be able to click an “import” button for the blog you want to import, shown below:
6. When it is done importing, the “Magic Button” will change to saying “Set Authors.” Click it and map your blogger users to WordPress users. If you haven’t created any WordPress Users except the default “admin” you can navigate away from this page and click on “users” in the upper right of your screen, create some users and come back to this screen to map them correctly. That’s it. You’re done!

Importing a TypePad (Movable Type) Blog:

I’ve only done this a handful of times, and I don’t have a TypePad account that I have access to so that I can take screenshots, so I’ll have to do this section from memory. As I recall, the steps are:

1. Login to your TypePad blog admin area. There should be an option somewhere that says “Export.” Click it and download the file it creates.
2. Then, rename the download file “mt-export.txt”
3. Next, in your WordPress blog’s admin area, go to “Manage” –> “Import” and click on the link that says “Moveable Type and TypePad”.
4. In the next screen, click on the “browse” button and locate the “mt-export.txt” file.
5. Click on “upload file and import.”
6. The rest should be simple

NOTE: I have noticed that imported TypePad blogs occasionally display weird behavior in ProPhoto WordPress blogs, where instead of showing full posts on the homepage, they only show excerpts. To fix this, in your WP Admin area, click on “Design” –> “AWP Managment”. Then click on the “Posts & Pages” module, and disable inline posts. Scroll down to save your changes, and your posts should now display in full.

Importing a WordPress.com Blog:

If you have a free blog through WordPress.com and are switching to a self-hosted WordPress installation on your own domain and webhost, the steps to import are pretty simple.

1. First, log into your old WordPress.com blog admin area and click on “Manage” –> “Export” and then click on “Download Export File.”
2. Next, log into your new, self-hosted WordPress blog, and click on “Manage” –> “Import”. Click on browse and locate the file you just downloaded, and then click “Upload file and import.”
3. Finally, map your old users to existing users in your new blog or create new users to map to and click submit.

Questions? Instead of emailing for support, leave a comment below so everyone can benefit from any clarification.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 and is filed under Blogging, Frequently Asked Questions, Misc. FAQs. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.