Moving a Tumblr blog to WordPress: numeric post IDs, reblogs and media

Two ways to get the content

The Tumblr Importer plugin connects to your Tumblr account through Tumblr's API and imports posts, drafts and pages, sideloading images, audio and video into the media library and setting post formats (image, quote, link, audio, video) to match. It asks for OAuth keys, which you get by registering an app in Tumblr's developer settings. The plugin is community-maintained and has not been tested against recent WordPress releases; reviewers report trouble with video posts and single images turned into galleries. Run it on a staging copy and inspect the result before trusting it.

Tumblr's own export comes from the blog's settings (Export the blog, then download the backup when it is ready). The ZIP holds a posts folder with one HTML file per post and a posts.xml of the whole blog, plus a media folder with the images and videos. WordPress cannot import it directly, but it is the most complete backup you will get, and the media folder is useful if the plugin fails to copy some files.

Neither route gives you SEO titles or meta descriptions, since Tumblr posts do not have separate fields for them. Plan to write descriptions for the posts that bring in visitors.

Reblogs and thin posts

A typical Tumblr archive is full of reblogs: other people's posts that appeared on your blog. Imported into WordPress, they become pages of someone else's content under your domain, often with nothing added. That helps nobody in search and can look like copied content.

Sort the archive before you publish it:

• Original long-form posts move as they are.
• Original short image or quote posts can be grouped into fewer, fuller posts, with the old URLs redirected to the combined post.
• Reblogs are usually best left out, or kept as drafts. If some carry traffic, redirect their URLs to your closest related post; otherwise let them return 404 or 410, which is honest for content that no longer exists on your site.

Redirects keyed on the post ID

Because Tumblr resolves posts by number, the same post shows up in backlinks as /post/7123.../my-trip, /post/7123..., and with older slugs from before a title edit. Build rules on the ID:

1. List every post's ID and new WordPress URL. The posts.xml file in the export includes each post's ID, URL and date, which you can match to the imported posts by title and date.
2. In Hydrogen SEO's Redirection Manager, add an Exact Match rule for /post/<ID> and a Starts With rule for /post/<ID>/. Include the slash in the Starts With rule; without it, /post/123 would also match /post/1234....
3. Add rules for /tagged/<tag> pages that have links or traffic, pointing at the matching WordPress tag.

For thousands of posts, generate server rules instead from a two-column sheet with the redirect rule generator, or a single rewrite that captures the ID and looks it up in a map.

On a custom domain, the switch is a DNS change from Tumblr's servers to your WordPress host, made once the rules are live on staging. Leave the Tumblr blog in place until the checks below pass.

Rankings and what to check

Tumblr blogs on a custom domain that move with complete ID-based redirects usually keep most of the search traffic they had, though a Tumblr archive rarely ranks much beyond its best original posts. Dropping reblogs will reduce the page count; that is expected and is not a loss of real traffic. A blog on a tumblr.com subdomain starts fresh on the new domain.

• Test old URLs with and without the slug part.
• Confirm images and videos load from your media library rather than Tumblr's media servers.
• Check that reblogs you left out return 404 or 410, not an empty page.
• Submit the WordPress sitemap and run the site audit for broken internal links, many of which will still point at /post/ URLs.