After trying out several different blogging and newsletter platforms here’s what I’ve settled on for 2025 (and hopefully beyond!)
No affiliate links. Just sharing in case it’s helpful.
Newsletter 💌
This month I transitioned my monthly newsletter to Buttondown. It’s a paid service, but they do not take a percentage of paid subscriptions. The main reason I chose to move is that Buttondown offers RSS-to-email. Which means it can auto publish your blog posts as a newsletter! This is going to save me HOURS of formatting.
Beehiiv almost solved this problem by doing the opposite. But the blog posts were always badly formatted with HTML garble-de-gook I had to delete. I did a quick test with Buttondown and the process is super clean.
I’ve also been able to transition my paid subscribers who more than cover the cost. (I will say Substack’s AI Chat Bot made this as hard as possible, but Buttondown’s customer service is really helpful. Definitely a case of “you get what you pay for.”
Blog ✏️
After trying A LOT of blogging platforms I’m back on WordPress.org where I can have everything under one roof. I used WP years ago and wish I’d never moved away. There’s nothing like WordPress when it comes to robust blogging systems.
I’ve set up a blog with multiple categories (Compost Heap, Zines, Photos, Scraps) and a tag system and I’ll be moving over archives one month at a time. I’m really excited to invest my time into my own website rather than pouring it out into social media.
WordPress.org is free, but you have to pay for hosting. I’m using Hostinger and it’s too soon to recommend it, but I’ve found their platform easy to manage so far (versus others I’ve used and hated *cough* Bluehost *cough*.) I also love OnlyDomains for easy domain name registration and hosting.
Podcast 🎧
I’m also moving my podcast off Substack and back to Red Circle. Because I was an early adopter I was grandfathered in to a lifetime free plan so I may as well be using that.
Moving the archives and show notes is a long term project.
Which brings me to…
Taking my TIme ⌛
I confess that I haven’t made a clean break with Substack yet.
At some point I might leave completely, but I may as well take my time with the transition. I’ve taken the nuclear option in the past and lots posts and regretted it.
There are a few reasons:
- I have 172 posts that need to be moved. Many of them are multimedia and have elements that do not export and import easily. If you export Substack files and import to WordPress the photos don’t move and you have to do it manually. (It looks like they are there, but they are loading the photos from Substack’s servers.) It doesn’t even try to move audio files, transcripts, etc. So Self Pub 101 and Crowdfunding 101 will remain there for now.
- Anyone who has linked to Substack posts I’ve written will be looking for them there. As I transition out I can leave a breadcrumb for people to find the post on my website, but there’s no quick and easy way to do this.
- Since I’m staying for the reasons above I’m also going to take advantage of the “network effects” while they last. Maintaining Substack (my own and Neurokind) as a quarterly newsletter for my publishing imprint.
- Keeping a portion of my list on Substack keeps me under the 900 subscriber threshold (when Buttondown when the prices triple.) Anyone who hasn’t opened an email since moving off Substack was moved back into that ecosystem.