Import Issues from Substack

Moving from Substack leaves your best issues behind on someone else’s platform. Copying them by hand takes hours per post, and every image still points at Substack’s servers.

MailerHive imports Substack posts by their slugs. Each post becomes a published issue with its title, date and subtitle, and its images move into your media library. Links between imported posts are rewritten to point at your new issue pages.

Set the Publication

Enter your Substack subdomain under Substack publication on Newsletter → Settings → Modules. For yourname.substack.com, that’s yourname. The importer and the relink tool both use it.

Import from wp-admin

1. Go to Newsletter → Settings → Tools & status.
2. Under Import from Substack, check the Publication subdomain.
3. Paste the post slugs into Post slugs, one per line. For yourname.substack.com/p/my-first-post, the slug is my-first-post.
4. Select Import from Substack.

The result lists each slug with “imported”, “already imported” or “not found on Substack”. MailerHive then relinks all imported issues.

Import with WP-CLI

wp mailerhive import-substack my-first-post another-post --publication=yourname --dry-run

• --dry-run fetches and converts without saving, and prints each title, date, length and image count.
• --publication overrides the saved subdomain.
• --title and --slug override the title and slug, for a single post only.

What Comes Across

• Title, slug and date from the Substack post.
• Subtitle into both the issue’s subtitle and its excerpt.
• Images copied into your media library and attached to the issue. The first one becomes the featured image when the issue has none.
• Footnotes, with their numbers.

Imported issues are published straight away and get no automatic MailerPress draft. Running the same slug again skips it as “already imported”.

What Doesn’t

• Subscribe buttons and Substack widgets are removed, since your own subscribe box replaces them.
• Embeds such as videos and tweets arrive as empty frames. Open each imported issue and replace them with an embed block or a link.
• Comments, likes and paywall settings stay on Substack. To make an imported issue paid, set Who can read this issue after the import.

Fix Links Between Issues

Imported posts often link to each other with Substack addresses. Relink imported issues under Tools & status, or wp mailerhive relink, rewrites those links to your local issue pages. It runs after every import, from wp-admin or WP-CLI, except a dry run.

Relinking edits the issues directly in the database. It creates no revisions and doesn’t clear your page cache, so purge the cache afterwards.