About this plugin
TopoSEO Importer for Substack brings your existing Substack posts into WordPress as native
posts, from the official Substack export file you download from your own account. It
cleans out Substack’s subscribe and share widgets, copies every photo into your Media
Library (so nothing hotlinks back to Substack), and can sort each post into the right
category using configurable filing rules.
It is built for a one-time migration of your own history, and it is safe to run
repeatedly — nothing is ever imported twice. When you publish more on Substack later,
create a fresh export and run the importer again; it brings in only the new posts.
What the free plugin does
- Imports every published post with its photos, dates, titles and subtitles, from
zip.
- Copies photos into your Media Library — full-resolution copies, de-duplicated so
a photo used in several posts is stored once, with the first image set as the
featured image. Nothing hotlinks to Substack.
- Strips Substack widgets — subscribe, share and other Substack-only blocks are
removed so you get clean WordPress content.
- Auto-files into categories with smart match and an ordered list of custom rules
(contains / starts with / exactly equals / regular expression), a fallback category
and guardrails that protect posts you have filed by hand.
- Rewrites internal links — links between your own posts are repointed to their
imported WordPress copies.
- Canonical option — keep Substack as the canonical home (so the WordPress copy is
not treated as duplicate content), or let WordPress stay self-canonical.
- Gentle, resumable imports — gentle mode (on by default), a Stop button, a
posts-per-cycle pacing control, live progress and a Status tab, so large archives
work even on tight shared hosting. Posts can be imported live or staged as drafts.
Pro
A one-time TopoSEO Pro upgrade adds a 301 redirect map for
your old Substack links, AI image alt text, AI SEO meta descriptions, AI category
suggestions and selective import (by keyword, series or date range). The free importer
keeps working with or without it.
What it sends and fetches
The plugin downloads your post images from Substack’s image CDN while importing. By
default it only retrieves images hosted on Substack’s own infrastructure (the only
images a Substack export references); any image a post embeds from another site is
left linked to its original source unless you turn on “External images” in Settings.
It makes no other external requests and sends no data anywhere.
External services
This plugin imports the images in your Substack export by downloading them from the servers that host them, so your published posts do not hotlink back to Substack. This happens only while you are running an import.
For every image referenced by your export, the plugin sends an HTTP request to fetch that image from:
- Substack’s image CDN ( substackcdn.com ) and the Amazon S3 storage Substack keeps media in ( amazonaws.com ). Only the image URL from your export is requested — no account credentials, personal data or site data are sent. These are Substack’s own services; see Substack’s Terms of Use (https://substack.com/tos) and Privacy Policy (https://substack.com/privacy).
If you enable the optional “External images” setting, the plugin will also download images your posts embedded from other websites, by requesting those image URLs directly from wherever they are hosted. This is off by default.
The plugin makes no other external requests, performs no license or activation checks, and sends no data to TopoSEO or any other third party.