How to Migrate Your Blog from Tumblr to WordPress (Starter‘s Guide)

Are you ready to take your blogging more seriously and move from Tumblr to self-hosted WordPress? You‘re in good company. WordPress now powers over 43% of all websites, and its market share continues to rise.

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While Tumblr still has a sizable following with over 496 million blogs as of 2023, WordPress has emerged as the platform of choice for professional bloggers and businesses who want greater ownership, control, and customization options for their content.

In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll walk you through the benefits of migrating from Tumblr to WordPress and give you a detailed roadmap to make the transition as smooth as possible. By the end, you‘ll have your Tumblr content fully imported into WordPress, your old Tumblr URLs redirected to prevent broken links, and a powerful new blogging platform to help you reach your content goals.

5 Reasons WordPress is Better Than Tumblr for Blogging

Before we get into the specific migration steps, let‘s look at some key reasons why WordPress is a better long-term blogging solution than Tumblr:

Ownership and control of your content – With WordPress, you host your own content on your own web host and domain name. No one can take your site down or delete your data.
Powerful customization options – WordPress has over 10,000 free and paid themes to control your site‘s design, plus over 60,000 plugins to add features like contact forms, SEO, ecommerce, and more. Tumblr‘s customization options are very limited.
Better monetization potential – WordPress offers many more ways to monetize your blog, including running ads, adding affiliate links, creating sponsored content, selling digital products, and creating membership sites. Tumblr‘s options are much more limited.
Improved SEO capabilities – WordPress is very SEO-friendly. It allows you to optimize your permalinks, create SEO-friendly title tags and meta descriptions, and build high-quality backlinks to your content. Tumblr blogs often struggle to rank well in search engines.
Vibrant open source community – As an open source platform, WordPress has a massive global community of developers, content creators, and users who contribute to its growth and success. You‘ll find a wealth of resources, tutorials, events and support. Tumblr offers very little support or community.

Now that you understand why WordPress is the better choice, let‘s dive into how to migrate your Tumblr blog over, step-by-step.

Step 1: Export Your Tumblr Content

To get started, log in to your Tumblr account, go to the Account Settings, and look for the "Export" option. This allows you to download an archive of all your Tumblr content, including text posts, images, reblogs, and more.

Depending on how much content you have, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes for Tumblr to create your archive. Once it‘s ready, you‘ll get an email with a link to download a ZIP file.

Download this ZIP archive and extract the contents somewhere on your computer. The key file you need is the XML file which contains all your Tumblr data in a structured format that WordPress can import. It will be named something like tumblr_[your-blog].xml.

Step 2: Set Up a WordPress Site

Now you need a place to import your Tumblr content to. This means setting up a self-hosted WordPress site on your own domain name.

I recommend using a reputable WordPress hosting company like Bluehost, Siteground, or WP Engine. For a free domain name and big discount on WordPress hosting, check out this deal from Bluehost.

After purchasing a hosting plan and registering your domain, you‘ll need to install the WordPress software. Most hosts offer 1-click installers for WordPress in the hosting control panel to make this easy. If you get stuck, your host‘s support team can help.

With WordPress installed, log in to your new site and start getting familiar with the dashboard. Before worrying about your design or content, I recommend configuring a few key settings:

In Settings > General, set your Site Title and Tagline
In Settings > Permalink, choose the "Post Name" URL structure for best SEO
In Settings > Reading, choose whether your homepage displays your latest posts or a static page

I also suggest installing a few essential WordPress plugins at this point:

Yoast SEO for search engine optimization features
Wordfence for security and firewall protection
UpdraftPlus for automatic site backups

Step 3: Import Your Tumblr Content to WordPress

Now the fun part – transferring your Tumblr content into your new WordPress site! Fortunately, WordPress has a built-in Tumblr importer tool that does most of the heavy lifting.

To access the importer, go to Tools > Import from your WordPress dashboard. Find the Tumblr option and click the "Run importer" link:

On the next screen, you‘ll be prompted to upload the XML file you exported from Tumblr in Step 1. Go ahead and upload it and then click the "Upload file and import" button.

WordPress will now process your import file and create new posts and pages for each of your Tumblr posts. Depending on how much Tumblr content you have, this could take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.

Once the import finishes, you should see a "Success" message. At this point, I recommend going to the Posts and Pages sections to verify that all your content was imported properly.

It‘s normal for your imported posts to have some formatting issues due to differences between how Tumblr and WordPress structure content. To clean things up, you may need to go through and edit individual posts, adjusting headings, images, embeds, and more.

Step 4: Redirect Tumblr to WordPress

An important step that many people overlook when migrating from Tumblr to WordPress is setting up proper redirects. Without redirects, any links pointing to your old Tumblr posts and pages will break, hurting your site‘s user experience and SEO.

To avoid this, you can set up 301 redirects that automatically forward visitors from your old Tumblr URLs to the equivalent pages on your new WordPress site. Here‘s how:

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New
Search for the "Redirection" plugin and install it
Go to Tools > Redirection to set up a new redirect
Set the Source URL to ^/post/(.*) and the Target URL to /POSTNAME/$1, using the "Regex" match type
Set the HTTP code to "301 Moved Permanently" and the Match type to "URL only"
Click "Save" and test your redirects to make sure they work

With this redirect rule in place, all links to your old Tumblr posts like example.tumblr.com/post/123456789/example-post will automatically forward to the WordPress equivalent at example.com/example-post.

Step 5: Customize Your New WordPress Blog

Congratulations – you‘ve now successfully migrated your Tumblr blog to WordPress! At this point, your content is all imported and your old Tumblr links are redirected.

The final step is to customize the design and functionality of your new WordPress blog to make it your own. Here are a few key things to consider:

Install a WordPress theme – Browse the official WordPress theme directory to find a free theme you like, or invest in a premium WordPress theme for more features and flexibility. I‘m a fan of the Astra theme for its performance, customization options, and pre-built templates.
Customize your theme – Use the WordPress Customizer and theme settings to tweak your site‘s colors, fonts, header, navigation menu, sidebar widgets, and more to match your personal style and brand.
Install key plugins – Take advantage of the WordPress plugin ecosystem to add features like contact forms, social media integration, email marketing, an Instagram feed, and more. Check out WPBeginner‘s 23 Must Have WordPress Plugins For Your Blog for some ideas.
Set up Google Analytics – Don‘t forget to add Google Analytics so you can track your traffic and see how your content performs after the move from Tumblr. This guide walks you through how to add Google Analytics in WordPress.
Submit an XML sitemap – Finally, submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help Google properly index your new WordPress site. Use the Yoast SEO plugin to easily generate a sitemap and then submit it following these steps.

WordPress Resources and Guides

To further help you get up to speed with WordPress and grow your new blog, I‘ve compiled some of the best WordPress resources and guides from around the web:

WPBeginner – The largest free WordPress resource site for beginners, with hundreds of tutorials and guides.
IsItWP – Massive WordPress wiki with in-depth guides on WordPress errors, how-tos, and best practices.
WP 101 – Step-by-step WordPress video tutorials to help you learn WordPress inside and out.
WPForms – Extensive documentation and guides on creating any type of online form in WordPress.
Envato Tuts+ – Over a thousand developer and designer focused WordPress tutorials.

Additionally, consider joining some online WordPress communities to connect with other WordPress bloggers and get your questions answered:

Final Thoughts

I hope this in-depth guide has given you the knowledge and confidence to move your blog from Tumblr to WordPress. It may seem overwhelming at first, but by following the steps outlined here and taking advantage of the many resources available, you‘ll be up and running on WordPress in no time.

The most important things to remember are:

Carefully export your Tumblr content and import it into WordPress
Set up 301 redirects so you don‘t lose traffic from your old Tumblr links
Install an SEO-friendly WordPress theme and key plugins
Customize your new WordPress site to fit your needs and goals

Migrating to WordPress is a big step for your blog, but it‘s one that will pay dividends for years to come in terms of greater control, customization, monetization, and support. Welcome to the WordPress community!