I have been on WordPress for my blog for about two years but honestly I spend more time updating plugins and fighting with Gutenberg than writing. Ghost keeps coming up in recommendations and the editor looks clean.
Anyone made the switch? Is it actually simpler or just different complexity? My site is mostly longform articles, no ecommerce, about 200 posts.
made the switch last year and honestly never looked back. Ghost’s editor is just better for writing. No plugin ecosystem to manage, newsletters built in, membership stuff built in. The tradeoff is you get less flexibility - if you want something Ghost doesnt do out of the box, you are writing custom code or using Zapier.
200 posts is an easy migration. Ghost has a WordPress importer that handles most of it.
For the writing side, I have been using Walter Writes to draft blog posts on Ghost. The output integrates well with Ghost’s editor since it is clean markdown.
I would push back slightly on the WordPress complaints. If you are spending a lot of time on plugins, you might have too many. A well-configured WordPress site with a good theme and five or six essential plugins is very low maintenance.
That said, if your use case is pure content with no complex functionality, Ghost is a legitimate option. Just know that self-hosted Ghost needs Node.js and that is a different ops skillset than PHP/MySQL.
Have you considered a static site generator? For 200 longform articles with no ecommerce, something like Hugo or Eleventy would give you zero maintenance, incredible performance, and you write in markdown. Free hosting on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages.
The editing experience is different - you are working in text files not a web UI - but for a solo blogger who likes writing, it is actually quite nice.
Ghost self-hosted serves pages in about 50ms. A typical WordPress install with a page builder takes 800ms to 2 seconds. If page speed matters to you at all, the answer is obvious.
ok this is helpful. I think Ghost is the move for me since I want a web UI but less overhead than WordPress. @hugo_hector the static generator route sounds cool but I am not ready for text files yet. maybe someday
going to spin up a Ghost trial this weekend. thanks everyone
Coming at this from the WordPress editor side: a lot of the Gutenberg fighting goes away with a block theme and a handful of saved patterns. But for 200 longform posts and nothing else, Ghost is a fair call, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
One thing I’d sort out before migrating rather than after is the drafting workflow. noderunner mentioned using AI for drafts, and plenty of people do. The trap is picking a tool mid-migration and ending up with an archive where half the posts sound identical. When I helped a client move about 150 posts, we used the move to rewrite the weakest ones and tried several tools first. This AI writing tools comparison cut down the trial and error.
Practical note on the importer: it handled everything except shortcodes. Those came across as plain text and had to be fixed by hand, so search your WordPress content for [ before you export.