We regularly get emails from people who have long outgrown Typepad but have kept their blog on there because it’s just so hard to move off Typepad and over to WordPress (or any other blogging tool).
There is an export script which can we can use to import in your content to WordPress but this does not include your images and other files uploaded to Typepad. This really isn’t acceptable: you should be able to get back your content easily.
You could just leave the images on Typepad and not close your Typepad account (i.e. using it as an external image/file hosting service) and slowly move images over in your own time if you wanted.
Others manually save and manually add them all in again (painful). There are some “hacks” out there to try and grab all images and download them from your Typepad account (since Typepad does not offer a way to export all images) but then they still need to be manually add them in again.
Another thing to keep in mind with the move are the redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. If you are not using your own domain name, there is no simple or search-engine friendly way of redirecting people from the Typepad links over to the new WordPress ones.
Typepad unfortunately does not offer 301 redirects (which is what search engines consider good redirects). The only option available if you are using domain mapping on Typepad is to use meta refresh, which search engines advise strongly against if at all possible.
The final thing is the post content itself. Typepad’s fonts and colors and tags can come across looking strange sometimes in WordPress. You can subjectively assess this when the content is imported and you have your new WordPress theme enabled. Perhaps you won’t worry too much if your really old content’s formatting is a little bit imperfect. Others get us to write scripts to tidy things up in bulk, rather than repetitively do the same thing on each old blog post.
