Typepad shutting down on September 30. I'm crushed, but not surprised.
It hurts. There's no other way to say it.
I've been blogging on Typepad since 2003. So when I sleepily looked at my email inbox early this morning and saw the subject line "Important Notice -- Typepad Shutdown Announcement," I both woke up and felt distressed instantly.
I have three blogs with about 8,400 posts. My whole life, or at least my life since 2003, is reflected in those posts. Losing all that content would really bother me. This is what I told Typepad support back in March of this year, as reported in "Typepad told me they aren't going out of business. Hope that's true."
The Typepad outage yesterday spurred me to do some Googling about Typepad. I saw that you haven't accepted new customers since 2020 and may not be in business much longer. Hopefully that isn't true.
But if it is, I sure hope you guys will have a plan for those of us who have been with Typepad almost from the start, 2003. In those 22 years I've made about 8,300 posts on my three blogs. It's just overwhelming for me to think about losing all that content, which includes many personal experiences, since I partly use blogging as a form of a diary.
So I've got posts about deaths in the family, my granddaughter's birth, health problems, joys and sorrows, all that stuff. It's all under a Typepad URL, so if you go away, so does my ability to retrieve those posts.
I'm simply asking what I hope you're already planning to do in case Typepad goes out of business. Please seriously consider a plan to keep the posts of people like me available. I'm not computer savvy enough to know what this might be. I just know that I'd be willing to pay more to preserve that content, as I'm confident other Typepad users would be.
So it bothered me when today's email from Typepad simply directed users to the already existing export feature on Typepad. Sure, that's a lot better than nothing, but a lot worse than getting help from Typepad in migrating blog posts to a new platform. In that 2025 post I shared a reply I got from Laura of Typepad support.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your message. Although Typepad is no longer accepting new sign-ups, we continue to support our existing customers and there are no plans for that to change. If it were to change at some point, there would likely be a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform. However, as mentioned, there is no plan at this time to shut down Typepad, and the Support team are still here for you.
Thanks,
Laura
Well, now there's a plan to shut down Typepad without a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform. Noting that, today I sent this support ticket to Typepad.
I beg you to give us more time to export our content and set up a new blog. I have three Typepad blogs. Two were started in 2003 and 2004. I have over 8,300 posts. As I messaged your earlier this year, "It's just overwhelming for me to think about losing all that content, which includes many personal experiences, since I partly use blogging as a form of a diary. So I've got posts about deaths in the family, my granddaughter's birth, health problems, joys and sorrows, all that stuff. It's all under a Typepad URL, so if you go away, so does my ability to retrieve those posts."
I've started to look for a Wordpress developer who could set up three new blogs and hopefully import all or at least some of my previous posts. But this will take time and money. It seems unreasonable to expect that us Typepad users can handle all this in a bit more than a month. We need more time. How will my regular visitors to my blogs know where the new blog is when all they're get after September 30 is an error message?
Also, it would have been nice if you guys had offered some advice/help in migrating blog content. Last March I was told by Laura, "Thanks for your message. Although Typepad is no longer accepting new sign-ups, we continue to support our existing customers and there are no plans for that to change. If it were to change at some point, there would likely be a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform. However, as mentioned, there is no plan at this time to shut down Typepad, and the Support team are still here for you."
I optimistically thought that "a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform" meant more that just being able to use the existing export feature. I feel overwhelmed at the moment. Blogging has been a big part of my life for 22 years and it was a shock to get your email today, though not a complete surprise, since Typepad has been difficult to use and buggy for quite a while.
Once again, Laura was the person who replied to me today.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your message. We did originally hope that there would be an automated tool to migrate to another blogging platform but it turned out that this was not technically feasible.
Here are the steps that we recommend:
1) Set a date that you will make the last post to your active blogs and do the exports after that date, so that all of your posts are included.
2) Start research now to find a new provider. We don't recommend any specific platform, but in our experience WordPress is the nost popular alternative so we suggeset searching for the best pricing on that.
3) Once you have identified your new blogging provider, set up at least a landing page saying that content will be coming soon. Then you can link to that from your final post on your Typepad. Doing this lets people know that you are moving and where they should go.
4) You don't need to have the new blog(s) fully set up elsewhere by September 30, as long as you have the messaging up, as described above, and have the exports. Doing it this way buys you more time to actually import the content at the new provider because your messaging to readers is already in place.
I hope this helps you get started.
Thanks,
Laura
I have indeed started the search for a new blogging provider, focusing on WordPress. Along with contacting WordPress directly (they have a referral service for those willing to pay at least $5,000 to a WordPress developer, which I probably am), I've reached out to five WordPress developers I found via some Googling. Most are based in Oregon, where I live. Haven't gotten any responses yet.
Which isn't surprising, since Labor Day is next Monday and many people are still in summer vacation mode. That's partly why I was hoping Typepad would extend the September 30 shutdown date. I ordered a beginner's guide to WordPress from Amazon that will arrive tomorrow, because I may have to cobble together some WordPress blogs on my own fairly soon if I can't quickly find a WordPress developer who can do this for me.
I appreciated Laura's prompt reply, but it really wouldn't work to simply put a notice on my blogs a few days before September 30 that tells people where to find the blog after that date. I have regular blog visitors, but they don't all show up every day, or even every week. So I feel like I need to have a new blogging home by September 15 or thereabouts, to give visitors to my blogs several weeks of advance notice where I've ended up.
Bottom line: it seems to me that Typepad and its parent company could have handled the shutdown considerably better. I realize that these days corporations can be pretty heartless. It just feels wrong to only give us Typepad bloggers a bit more than a month to handle the shutdown of Typepad, with no help in migrating our content to another platform.
And below are a few comments (as of this morning)
After years and years of lies, this is Typepad's 'masterpiece'. Just like you, I am about to lose a big part of my life. So much work was put into the more than 7000 postings on my blog. I feel totally lost. And getting in touch with those scammers is more useless now than it ever was. They don't give a sh*t about us. They never did, actually.
amido, thanks for the link. I knew Typepad had an export function, but not that WordPress had a built in ability to migrate Typepad posts. I have over 8,000, but hopefully the importing from Typepad is still possible.
I’ve been working for nearly two years on a new blogging service, Pika. It really is meant to be much lighter weight than WordPress (for example). It really is quite nice, though I may be biased. The biggest missing feature I see is comments, which is something we are considering for the future. We also don’t yet have search, but hope to work on that soon. If you play around with it and Pika seems like a good fit, I’d be happy to help import your Typepad export for you.
The export file doesn't contain images, you have to contact support directly to ask for a downloadable file that has media in it. Hopefully they're still offering this service. I've done several Typepad > WordPress migrations over the years. It's not super straightforward but doable. Syncing up the images is the tricky part. I'm currently exploring the Typepad API to get comments imported that are still threaded, as that info isn't included in the text file either. Pretty frustrating. Good luck!
> The export file doesn't contain images, you have to contact support directly to ask for a downloadable file that has media in it.
If the export file has a still-working link to the image there might be a way to script and download the file for import into your target blogging service. (That’s how I’d write it for a Pika import.)
I feel the same as you, with over 7100 (daily) postings. It's my life.
This company has sold me so many lies in the past and now this. If only they could be sued...
Hey man, this sucks beyond compare, but I don't think you should despair or fork over $5k for carrying over your data.
I see from here https://firstsiteguide.com/move-movabletype-and-typepad-to-wordpress/
that typepad actually has an export function?
Worst case scenario, with a bit of tinkering and some help from LLMs, I think you could make a script to scrape everything, bring everything to JSON and then reimport into Wordpress.