How to Import Your Tumblr Blog into WordPress

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took to her new Tumblr page today to officially announce Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of the up-and-coming blogging site.

In her announcement, Mayer promised Tumblr’s 105 million bloggers and 300 million visitors that they would “not screw it up”—but that hasn’t convinced everyone.

In a blog post last night, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of rival blogging site WordPress, wrote that the number of blog imports from Tumblr to WordPress spiked from a normal of 400-600 an hour to more than 72,000.

“Tumblrs own blog used to be on WP; WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a ‘publicize’ option alongside Twitter and Facebook. […] Theres healthy import and export traffic both ways,” he says. “And while Yahoos all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think its a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.”

If you’re not convinced the acquisition of Tumblr is a positive move for the site, you can easily move your published content to WordPress. Here are step-by-step instructions for doing so.

How to Convert Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress

To migrate your content to WordPress.com, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and click the Tools tab from the navigation on the left. Then select Import.

On the next page, select Tumblr from the list, then click “Connect to Tumblr to begin.” You’ll be asked to grant the WordPress.com application read-and-write access to your Tumblr account. Click Allow.

The application will redirect you back to your WordPress dashboard to select the Tumblr blog you want to import. Find the one you want and click “Import this blog.” If your import gets stuck or you want to import from a different Tumblr account, click on the “Clear account information” button at the bottom to reset the importer. When the import is complete, the “Action/Status” section will read “Finished!”

Importing your Tumblr blog could take a while, the site warns, and because the importing process happens in the background, you may not see immediate results. If this happens, WordPress says, revisit that page to check on its progress.

Kristin Burnham covers consumer technology, social networking and social business for CIO.com. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kmburnham. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Kristin at kburnham@cio.com