Bloggers are moving their properties away from Substack for a variety of reasons including ethical concerns regarding Substack’s unwillingness to divest from fascist content creators. This article will share some tips on what to lookout for prior to moving to Ghost–one of more popular Content Management Systems replacing Substack.
Moving a Client From Substack to Ghost
Before we begin, of note, the ideal approach for any writer is to host your content/newsletter on your own website, running your own apps, and newsletters. Trouble is, not everyone has the expertise to run the backend/admin for this type of setup. This is where Ghost has entered the fray, offering an open source blogging platform that’s specifically devoted to writers with newsletters. It handles all of the aspects of a Substack has minus the robust ‘social’ components. It incorporates all of the elements of Mailchimp (or other newsletter providers) in an easy to use (albeit paid) platform. It also handles payment features (subscriptions) which we will get to shortly.
We have taken clients through the process of migrating to Ghost from Substack, some with thousands of subscribers (paid and free). Here are some considerations for you to think about prior to migrating that we encountered.
- First off, if you have a little bit of know-how, Ghost has complete documentation and useful tools to help you migrate seamlessly. There are three primary migration tools with easy instructions to help move all content, paid, and free subscribers. Use their helpful guide. If your newsletter/platform is relatively simple, your migration may be completed in under an hour.
- One of the aspects Ghost struggle with is porting over Podcasts. I have seen podcasts that are hosted normally in Substack port over successfully so I guess it depends.
- The tricky parts of migration likely includes how to handle the redirection of custom domains. If you’re using the regular yourdomain.substack.com setup then you have a straightforward pathway to redirecting to yourdomain.ghost.io. However, many writers employ custom domains. Depending on how your custom domain is setup will dictate how easy it will be to ensure you can properly redirect old Substack pages to the new location (urls) over at Ghost. This is critical to preserve page rank in Google; essentially informing search engines where the new content is located using what’s called a ‘301 redirect’.
- Note: Substack does not have a built in redirect feature where yourdomain.substack.com can be redirected to yourdomain.com hosted elsewhere. It’s by design so it’s harder to divest from Substack. Moving away from Substack requires a custom domain in order to redirect at all. (There could be a feature we missed in Domains within Substack but we couldn’t find it so post in the comments if you know of a different way.)
- The help docs at Ghost will describe all of the ways to port over content, and they will even show you how to implement a redirect at Ghost for handling old Substack links, but all of that info fails to divulge the redirects only work for custom domains. In other words, unless you are starting from scratch and deleting your Substack without concern for any organic search loss, you need to use that custom domain. For example….
- We had a client with a domain at Squarespace (but it could be anywhere) that was not being used at Substack but was going to be used for the new Ghost website. We migrated the content from Substack without issue. We migrated users, free and paid, without issue. But in order to get Substack to redirect to a new domain, Substack needed the custom domain FIRST. You have to setup the custom domain on Substack and pay the $50 bucks to Substack for URL rewriting. Wait for Substack to redirect yourname.substack.com to yourdomain.com, and only then initiate the shift of yourdomain.com to Ghost. Make sense?!
- Using your custom domain on Ghost has two stages (the same as Substack actually); change the CNAME and A records from Substack to Ghost. You’re essentially tricking Substack here. Substack will continue redirecting yourname.substack.com to the new yourdomain.com URLs, but by pulling the domain rug from underneath them by changing the DNS records from Substack to Ghost, yourdomain.com (which was briefly pointing to Substack) will resolve to the Ghost website. Clear as mud? If you know your way around domain records then you should have followed.
- Once this is complete there is still the step of redirects. Follow Ghost documentation on Substack redirects. The Substack page names are not the same (Substack adds a /p/ subfolder to the URL structure). This page discusses how Ghost implements the correct 301 (not 302) redirects through Ghost’s Advanced redirects settings.
It took us a minute to figure Substack has no redirect function outside of the substack.com ecosystem. They only accommodate changing URL structures for custom domains they think you’re using with Substack. So you have to actually do that–use your custom domain on Substack– before swapping to Ghost.
Other Considerations
- There are limitations with Ghost and most of them are design related. You have limitations that, say, a WordPress install might have, to do even simple things like float two images side-by-side (unless it’s in a gallery which has its own problems). What Ghost claims to do, handling newsletters and written content, it does with ease.
- Ghost recommends customers use the same credit card merchant as Substack for seamless migration. That means sticking with Stripe. If you have a large number (or any number) of paid subscribers, you might have trouble porting them over to Ghost without having paid members sign up again. There is, however, a Concierge option with Ghost. Their admin will help you migrate paid members in Stripe that were stuck with Substack (and Substack’s 10% fee) to Ghost memberships. The process requires revoking the Substack extension in Stripe. Talk to Ghost for help here.
That’s it for now. We’ll leave the comments open for any other tips or questions.