A few months back, a long-time blogger reached out in a panic. He’d been writing on Typepad since 2004—nearly two decades of thoughts, family photos, and niche community building. Then the email came: Typepad was shutting down in 30 days. He had 30 days to save 5,000 posts and nearly 10,000 images or watch it all disappear. This wasn’t just a website; it was his digital life’s work.
He wasn’t alone. This was part of a massive shift where we eventually helped 3,684 blogs find a new home during a Typepad to WordPress migration. If you’ve ever dealt with a platform sunsetting, you know it’s not just about moving text. It’s about data integrity and not losing the “soul” of the site in the process.
The mistake: Trusting the standard importer
My first instinct? “No problem, I’ll just use the built-in importer.” I thought I could just bump the memory_limit to 1GB, increase the execution time, and let the XML file do the work. Total rookie move. Trust me on this: when you’re dealing with a multi-gigabyte export file that spans twenty years, a web-based importer is going to choke. Every. Single. Time.
The import would run for five minutes, hit a timeout, and leave the database in a half-baked state. I ended up with duplicate posts, orphaned meta data, and—worst of all—missing media. Typepad’s export files often didn’t include the actual images, just links to their dying servers. If those servers went dark before we fetched the files, those images were gone forever.
A more surgical approach to migration
We had to stop treating this like a simple file upload and start treating it like a data recovery operation. We moved to a CLI-based approach, processing the import in chunks and writing a custom script to “sideload” the images. We needed to grab every image URL from the Typepad content, download it to the local server, and update the attachment ID in the post content.
/**
* Simple helper to sideload images during a massive migration.
* Prefixing with bbioon to keep things clean.
*/
function bbioon_sideload_migration_image( $url, $post_id ) {
if ( ! $url ) return;
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/media.php' );
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/file.php' );
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/image.php' );
// Magic happens here: fetching the remote file and creating the attachment
$attachment_id = media_sideload_image( $url, $post_id, null, 'id' );
if ( is_wp_error( $attachment_id ) ) {
error_log( 'bbioon_migration_error: ' . $attachment_id->get_error_message() );
return false;
}
return $attachment_id;
}
By using WP-CLI, we bypassed the browser timeouts entirely. It allowed us to monitor the process in real-time. If the script hit a snag on post #2,401, we knew exactly where it stopped and could resume without creating a mess of duplicates. It’s the difference between a sledgehammer and a scalpel.
Why stability matters for the long haul
As I saw in the official report on the Typepad migration project, thousands of creators were rightfully terrified. Many had archives going back to 2005. One blogger with 9,000+ images was literally in tears when she saw her archives live on WordPress. That’s why we do what we do. It’s not just code; it’s preservation.
WordPress is built for this. It’s open, it’s portable, and it’s not going away. When you move to a self-hosted or managed WordPress environment, you’re not just moving a blog; you’re taking ownership of your data.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast, especially when platforms start pulling the plug. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Got a massive archive sitting on a legacy platform? Don’t wait for the shutdown notice. Let’s get it moved the right way while the servers are still humming.
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