The posts are the easy part. The paying subscribers and the sending that reaches them are the publication, and neither transfers by itself.
Content exports easily. The audience and the money attached to it need a plan made before anything changes.
Free subscribers export as a list. Paid ones have a live billing relationship, and carrying that across is a deliberate exercise rather than an import.
Substack sends your posts as email as part of the product. WordPress does not, so the capability has to be chosen and tested before the first post goes out here.
Substack post URLs carry the search traffic and the inbound links a publication has accumulated, and they match no WordPress permalink structure without a rule for each.
The content export is straightforward. What needs attention is embeds and paywall markers, which mean something specific on Substack and nothing at all once imported.
Posts that were subscriber-only have to remain gated after the move, which is a membership decision rather than a content one.
Posts can be re-imported if something goes wrong. A broken billing relationship with paying subscribers cannot, so that gets settled before anything else moves.
A paid publication delivers most of its value to signed-in readers, and no page cache helps there. What decides it is the object cache and the database behind it.
Substack is a narrow product doing several jobs at once, and each of them becomes an explicit choice in WordPress.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Paid subscribers | Migrated with the billing relationship planned before anything else moves | Free subscribers are a list; paid ones are a live payment relationship, and that is the part of a publication that cannot be recreated if it breaks. |
| Newsletter sending | Chosen and tested before the first post is published here | Substack sends email as part of the product, so a publication that emailed every post loses that entirely unless it is rebuilt first. |
| Post URLs | Every /p/ address redirected to the new permalink | Those URLs carry the accumulated search traffic and inbound links, and they match no WordPress permalink structure without an explicit rule. |
| Paywall markers | Translated into real membership rules | A paywall marker in exported content means nothing after import, so subscriber-only archives become public unless the gating is rebuilt deliberately. |
| Embeds | Reviewed rather than trusted to carry | Substack-specific embeds and buttons export as markup that refers to a platform the site is no longer on. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, billing carried deliberately, and newsletter sending working before your first post.