On Migrating the Blog?

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I am contemplating making the jump to a different host for my online writing. WordPress, my current host, has become more focused on commercial websites than on blogging these days. My concern is that WordPress may discontinue support for blogging all together someday, and I’ll be out to lunch. Substack seems to offer the best alternative. It’s services are free (here I pay a minimal amount for ad free posting), and it offers a built in network and community. It also operates off of a newsletter premise, so when you subscribe you receive my post directly as newsletter recipients (I understand my subscribers here at WP get the same). As I look at Substack it is much more streamlined than WordPress is these days. And it is set up in a way that makes posting easier, and more user friendly in certain ways. If I do make this move I will of course always keep this site here; I have too much work embedded here to lose. But I’m hopeful that if I do make this move that you, my subscribers and readers, will follow me over there. Selah

7 thoughts on “On Migrating the Blog?”

  2. I’ve used WordPress and not Substack, but some thoughts: yes, Substack does seem to be great from a user-friendliness perspective. It seems like writing posts and managing the blog will feel smoother.

    However, to me WordPress feels like it has an advantage over Substack in terms of longevity. If you use Substack you will be more locked in to their platform compared to WordPress. As a younger startup looking to make revenue, they might still pivot their business model in the years to come; one example that comes to mind is Medium, which now I think has some sort of global paywall.

    I believe the WordPress software is completely open-source (https://wordpress.org/about/), which means you can always download your blog and take it with you if you disagree with WordPress’ direction in a few years. Take a look at these paragraphs (https://themeisle.com/blog/substack-vs-wordpress/):

    “Another advantage of WordPress’ self-hosted approach is that you have full ownership of your platform. With Substack, Substack could always decide to close your account (though Substack has been very supportive of writers so far). If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, no one can close your account because you control the platform.

    “Finally – a quick note. When we say β€œWordPress”, we’re talking about the free, open-source WordPress software at WordPress.org and not the WordPress.com service you might be familiar with. They’re different things. Confusing, right?”

  5. @Brian, thank you for the info. Mine is a wordpressdotcom not org hosted site. It seems to me that the upside, to stay with wordpress, only really applies if its “org.” But I’m just a writer who is not interested in the technical aspects of things so much. I’m still leaning substack at this point but we will see.

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