Customers of the platform were informed today (August 27th) that Typepad would be closing down completely on September 30, 2025 (giving whomever has stuck around a month to migrate). There are still many professionals who use the service and have their businesses reliant on it. I’m certain the percentage of hobbyist types is lower by comparison, but still represents serious pain when it comes to migrating to another platform.
Quick note, old school blogging may seem like it is out of vogue, but I can see it making a comeback with all of this nonsense happening with the larger social media platforms (where someone just wants to be in charge of most everything they can control). Blogger (owned by Google since 2003) began on August 23,1999 while WordPress launched in May 2003. Basically, that 2002-2003 timeframe was when text blogging was the big kid on the block (before that, it was things like old school newsgroups like Usenet and forums). Back in the mid-90’s through early 2000’s, there were a host of blog focused sites (LiveJournal, Xanga, SlashDot, etc); most of these became diminished when newer social media sites like MySpace and early Facebook launched.
Unlike many other blogging services where there were free (with limits) options, Typepad (launched around October 2003) was a paid service (after a 14-day trial period). In the earlier days, many large organizations utilized it for their web frontends (considered as one of the top blogging services). According to long time customers, the service began to falter during the pandemic where everything from development to uptime went downhill. I know for myself (if I had been a longtime user, that I would’ve started looking at alternative options at that time). Another blogger on the platform even inquired with the company in March 2025 if they were planning to go out of business, and were reassured this would not be the case.
IMHO, when I see boilerplate responses from customer service like that, I’d have to take it with large degrees of skepticism (it’s not like they are the ones making those type of key decisions or are even privy to what senior management/executives are discussing behind closed doors).
One of the biggest red flags is what seemingly is a lack of migration tools. I’ve semi-documented my own migration off of Blogger where even a seemingly standard XML export of my data, yielded various issues during the actual migration into WordPress (in hindsight, I can see why there is a cottage industry of professional migration services for handling WordPress). Some of the comments (from that Typepad customer) in their posting points to a larger issue of Typepad’s data export not being really reliable for moving to WordPress or any other platform.
Even across 3 different Blogger exports, it had a cumulative total of less than 3000 posts (a couple of hundred being drafts/ones I forgot to publish). The issues documented still required hours of manual editing (I still have one final step which is updating image links still pointing to Google servers; none of the plug-ins seemed to help with automating this part either). In comparison, many of these longtime Typepad customers have more than double this amount of postings (and associated multimedia) to deal with, where it is not promising that the company seemingly hasn’t had robust solutions given the companies earlier response that “they were working on it” (basically, users can export their data in who knows what usable format it will all be in).
This topic itself can go astray in many different directions (when you look at the company that owned Typepad; the mergers and acquisitions of this company highlights the breadcrumbs of the consolidation of the larger domain name holders and several web hosting businesses – one that needs its own posting for). Typepad itself stopped accepting new signups in 2020, instead directing potential customers over to Bluehost (which their parent company owned along with several other such providers and domain name registrars). If I feel like wasting time on something, I might dig further into this and write about it.
I do feel bad for those who stuck with Typepad and are now facing this daunting task of trying to restart elsewhere or possibly just calling it a day with their own blog. That for some isn’t easy (again, if its a business) because like any other platform/service that has a social aspect to it, a community may have been created over the years. This is what is going away completely for those in the Typepad community at the end of September where it will feel like losing a family member. Hopefully most will at least find some solutions in the short time they have.
