Importing your podcast to Captivate, a complete guide

When you sign up to Captivate you have the option of either starting a brand new podcast, or importing as many podcasts as you like from your old podcast hosting provider at no extra cost!

Importing your podcast to Captivate is easy, secure and can be done in a matter of minutes without the loss of any of your listeners.

Before we get started...

• If you currently run dynamic ads on your current host, you’ll need to disable those before import, and then re-insert using Captivate’s dynamic insertion tool, AMIE.
• Sometimes your old host will have it set that your show must only display, for example, 150 episodes in your feed. We have made sure that Captivate checks your episode numbers and that if we detect that your show has published more episodes than are in your feed, we let you know to change that setting in your old host before importing. It's the little things, right?
• For added security, when you begin importing an RSS feed, Captivate will trigger a verification email to the address registered to the feed, letting you know that the import has started.
• If you have transcripts or chapters on your podcast, these won’t be imported, since they use the transcript / chapters tag and don’t appear in your public RSS feed. We’re looking at how to bring those over, but for now you’ll need to manually re-upload to your episodes.
• Since there isn''t a default method of moving analytics between hosting companies, be sure to download your current analytics and then use our Legacy Analytics Importer to upload them to Captivate.

Here's your complete, step-by-step guide to importing your podcast.

• In your Captivate dashboard, click Add New Podcast
• To the top right of the next screen, click Switch Your Podcast to Captivate
• On the next screen, either add your podcast name to search for it, or add your RSS feed directly
• When you see the results, check the information is correct (artwork, title, description, amount of episodes to import, etc)
• Once satisfied everything is as it should be, click Next
• If you already have podcasts on Captivate and are using the network feature, choose whether to add this podcast to that network. Otherwise, choose your RSS Feed URL or leave it as the default one we provide
• Click Submit

And that's it - your podcast is now imported, and ready to start publishing new episodes with Captivate! You can check the progress of the import by clicking Episodes in the left hand menu of your dashboard.

Note: After you import your podcast from another host, you do not need to submit your show to Apple, Spotify etc again - they will read the 301 redirect from your old host and automatically know that you've moved.

Recommended reading:

How to set up a 301 redirect

Updated on: 26/11/2025