Since the news of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr, users of the CMS are migrating their blogs over to WordPress like African Swallows unladed with coconuts. There are quite a few ways to migrate, so we figured we could save you the trouble and share a quick and simple way, which can be done in a few easy steps.
1. Create a WP Engine account
You gotta have an awesome place to host your site. Once you have your domain name, create an account with WP Engine to help with all your WordPress needs.
2. Authenticate with Tumblr
Inside your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools → Import and look for the Tumblr Importer. Click on it. You will be prompted to enter the email address you used to sign up for Tumblr and your Tumblr password. Now click the Connect to Tumblr bar, below.
3. Import into WordPress
The importer will fetch and list your blogs and give you the option to import as many as you’d like by clicking Import This Blog. You will be able to watch the progress of the imports on the import page and you will also be sent an email with the import is completed. Your videos will either be imported to your server or embedded. Your embedded content will be converted to easy-to-use shortcodes. If the importer comes across an embed it can’t convert, WordPress will provide this information in your import completion email.
There’s one extra step if your Tumblr site has a custom domain, i.e. “skateordie.com” instead of “skateordie.tumblr.com.” In this case you must make sure to disable the custom domain while the import is being processed (you can change it back later if you’d like). To do this, go to the Tumblr dashboard, click on Settings, and then un-check the Use a Custom Domain checkbox. Now set up Domain Mapping so users can find you at the same domain you had before.
4. Get to Stylin’
While you’re waiting for all your content to import, you might as well play around with the different looks you might want for your new blog. WordPress even has a ton of themes that are meant specifically for tumblelogs. There are seriously so many themes for WordPress. You might also want to visit WooThemes or themeforest for ideas.
Before you know it, all of your content will be imported and you’ll be experimenting with new looks, tools and features. Your blogging is about to get a whole lot more personalized and dynamic. Welcome to WordPress!
I didn’t know it was possible but with wpengine, nothing is impossible lol 🙂
Hi!
Thank for this article!
But I have some questions. Will I lose traffic or SEO ranking by using this method of migration? Is there any tool that implement some kind of redirects to point out to search engine and my users about my switching? I have a lot of posts so I’m really afraid to lose them? Also, I found one tut http://bit.ly/ZOJ0xo Is it worth trying?
I will be really grateful for your suggestions!
Thank in advance!
King Regards,
Howard!
Any tips on importing disqus comments over?
I’ve done the import of all posts and have tumblr to wordpress synced via IFTTT.
The only thing I’d like to do now is to sync up comments so the WP install pulls up the same comments as it’s respective post on tumblr. Any ideas?
I am interested in this as well. Did you happen to find a solution?
Well explained. Although I believe there are some other tips as well that should be taken into concern after the migration is done as WordPress differs with Tumblr in many respects and one would never like to lose any SEO juice after migrating.
Have a look at this post(http://bit.ly/1abNMca) that explains the post migration tasks
FWIW, step 2 seems to be out of date — I had to create a tumblr app and authorize it before being able to begin the import process. The tumblr importer plugin does a good job of walking you through this process, thankfully.
Well I will try this and will give feedback afterwards.
Thanks
Nice article, but recently I’ve found even more simple convert way – cms2cms. It’s perfect for people with non-techie background who want to quickly migrate their data, without design.. recommend to review it too .
You can also try this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/cms2cms-automated-tumblr-to-wp-migration/
Helped me a lot