Moving To Ghost From Substack

Using Ghost
1

Hi all, thanks for the forum.

I’m considering moving a blog from Substack to Ghost. I’m hoping to learn a lot about how well the Ghost team can move the site from Substack to Ghost. I realize this requires a years payment upfront.

I have about 400+ pages, a great many images, and dozens of large videos. How much of this can the Ghost team move, and how much would I have to move?

Reports from staff and anyone who has been through this process are appreciated. Thanks!

2

I can’t speak for Ghost(Pro), but having moved quite a few Substack blogs to Ghost myself, the amount of manual work is pretty minimal.

In my experience, the built-in Substack importer (Settings → Import) isn’t working very well. Mostly due to Substack’s import format being somewhat inconsistent/not what Ghost expects.

So, what I usually do for my customers is a migration using the Ghost migrate tool:

That will generate a single ZIP file with all images, posts, etc. which can then be uploaded to Ghost – which is the only manual task necessary.

If you’re comfortable using a command line interface, you could even do that yourself :slight_smile:

3

Thanks much for your reply, appreciated. To clarify, the importer moves EVERYTHING?

So if I were to host with Ghost, and they do the importing, there’s nothing for me to do other than pay the bill?

If I were to self host, I could hire someone like yourself to take care of the entire move?

4

There is a separate importer for Substack members (migrate/packages/mg-substack-members-csv at main · TryGhost/migrate · GitHub), but yes. With these, you can usually import an entire Substack blog/newsletter into Ghost.

Again, not sure how the Ghost(Pro) migration works (might be worth asking them at support@ghost.org, since this is only a community forum), but given that they created these migration tools, I would assume these are there for a reason :grin:

If you were to self host, you could hire a Ghost expert or look here in the community, yeah. I personally only do migrations for my own customers at Magic Pages.

5

Thanks again. I came here because the support page told me this was where I should be. The support page seemed to suggest the email was only for existing customers. But you’re right, I should try it, and see what happens.

Thanks for introducing me to Magic Pages. I like your presentation.

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