I feel each platform is a bit different and what may fit one platform may not work on another and I find that to be a challenge.

Some day, come back and let me know how it went for you!

thank you! getting your feedback and others in my mastermind group is the encouragement and counsel I think I've been needing. I will have to do some more planning and designing... but I think this may be the right answer! thank you for your advice, truly.

Katie - it absolutely makes sense to migrate! You'll gain the deliverability of Substack along with their engine to send you interested people. That's something you don't get from either WordPress or Mailchimp! Make sure you export your mailing list from MailChimp and import it into Substack. You can also use your RSS feed in WordPress to migrate all of your old blog posts over. (You can also copy/paste them if you want to reformat.) Substack has a tutorial on that, I believe. Your RSS feed will be in your admin area of WordPress, under settings->reading. Depending on how many posts you have, you may need to increase the size of the feed and make sure it sends the whole post, not just the excerpt. Yes, that means I've done it. (grin) And I did still need to do some prettying up and finding of images and such afterwards, but the import worked pretty well.

A Substack publication will look different than a website (for now... new features coming soon, apparently) but you still have options for branding that will help. Have fun!

It isn't the same, but it can be done. The trick is that you don't always have direct access to your fans like you do from a mailing list. If you just had a mailing list without a website attached... you'd capture that traffic. I have a client who lost access to over a million fans once due to changes in a platform she didn't control. It can be tough to lose those and need to start over. (Spoiler: she did start over and they were glad to find her, and she's doing great.)

Excellent, Bryan! Writing and having a website that just does what you need is perfect!

Thanks, Diana! I was delighted when one of my teachers showed me Carrd.io. That meets a lot of needs and can help people have more options if they need to leave WordPress.Com for any reason. You've got a website setup that is working for you - YAY! As long as it continues working and you are satisfied, absolutely no reason to switch those. But it does help to have a backup plan just in case these days.