Can We Get Back Email List Names We Lost? And Advice for Going Forward?

My last blog post here was about a problem on a website we recently moved here for hosting, one that my husband and I run together. We got that solved (thanks, folks!) but now there is another issue. I haven't yet asked Site Support, because it seems to me to be more of a strategy matter, but I will ask them if this blog post doesn't yield something from phil1944, ParthaB, DianeScorpio, (hint hint hint) or others here. (The image above is the header on that site.)

So here's a little background. I am the Worpress person... (Kelly's own sites he runs in Dreamweaver.) On this site we were using Jetpack for our site data, but then I read here in WA that it isn't compatible with WA features and we are not supposed to use it. So I took it off. I've been working with the training series phill1944 did on How to Set up and Use Google Analytics: Part 1 (wealthyaffiliate.com) but I've hit some snags. I think I can work them out. This post isn't about them, just to say I don't have GA up on the site yet, so we don't have data from Google about where our readers come from.

Here's the Question

In the sidebar, we had two widgets, one for people to sign up for a weekly update from the site via Mailchimp for Wordpress and another widget also using the same MChimp for WP for people who wanted to be updated whenever a new post went up, which was 3 or 4 times a week. (BTW, there is a place in the backend of Mailchimp for Wordpress where it says it is NOT the same as Mailchimp or affiliated with it, Huh?)

I figured we just needed one of those widgets and that the lists would be combined, but it looks like I was wrong. I took off the widget for updates as blog posts came out.

Uh oh. Kelly immediately noticed that he wasn't getting nearly as many comments as he used to after he put up a blog post. He says he doesn't want to murder me, but he was very disappointed about it. When he checked his monthly stats in Jetpack, they had been running over a thousand visitors a day before May but in May they dropped to about 750.

He went looking for those names and hasn't been able to find them. He went to the waybackmachine at archive dot com and he did find the widget and copied the code. But there aren't any names there.

So is there some way to get the lost names? Any suggestions?

Going Forward

I will get Google Analytics working on the site, and that will be Google Analytics 4 which will become the default version next summer. I'll also add Google Search Console. Based on the data we'll get, we can see what to do for more traffic. Any further ideas?