Import blog from Tumblr to WordPress can totally destroy your blog if you do it wrong

We decided to move our AlternativeTo blog from Tumblr to WordPress some days ago and I just want to share some of my experiences about that process. To begin with, I didn’t get the importer that used the Tumblr API to import the blog at all. I could log in and everything but absolutely nothing happened. I waited for at least one hour before I gave up.

But it was when I tried to use some other importers that the problems got really serious. I did some googling and I found a site called Tumblr2Wordpress, beware of this exporter if you use WordPress. It says nothing on this site at all but as soon as you import to WordPress via the XML file produced from this site your site is more or less screwed. I got an error saying “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again.” or something like that every time I edited a post, saved a draft, or tried to publish a post. I spend hours debugging this before I figured out it was this importer that caused this.

Finally, I looked on the page about importing on WordPress.org and they warns about the Tumblr2Wordpress site and they provided a link to a site called Tumblr2wp that worked. Too bad that site didn’t have a better rank in Google, would have saved me hours of work and frustration. Hopefully, someone will find this post at least if you are getting the same problems I had.