Moving From WordPress to Ghost: The Verdict
A little over a month ago, this site moved from WordPress to Ghost. (Read the post about my motivations here.) Today, I'll offer some early thoughts on the Ghost experience so far. Long story short: It's been exceptionally positive.
Visual Editor
A few quirks aside, I've embraced Ghost's editor. It's clean and insanely fast. The ability to save snippets for future use saves a great deal of time. The blocks specific to emails and newsletters make sense. Conditional logic, baby.
Maintenance
Minimizing the amount of time I spent fixing bugs, messing with caches, and the like was a primary goal of moving to Ghost. Mission accomplished.
A More Integrated Reader Experience
Over the past few years, I've often visited an author's website and noticed something odd: it almost immediately encouraged me to go to Substack, Beehiiv, or someplace else.
Exhibit A: David Epstein—a truly gifted writer whose work I enjoy. Ditto for Dan Pink and scores of others. I wonder if I'll miss out on one of their articles because I don't subscribe to both their blogs and newsletters.
By using Ghost as a single distribution channel, I've eliminated that source of potential reader confusion. They need not wonder:
- Where I publish different articles.
- How I delineate among blog posts, articles, or newsletters.
- If they're missing anything.
Put differently, if I publish something, it's here. Period. (In the future, I may create separate newsletters if I want to segment my audience.)
Two months ago, that wasn't the case. My content was fractured across different websites. Different people saw different things—and I couldn't easily determine which posts were popular.
The Move to a Subscription Model
I'll be honest: It's been an adjustment not just publishing content for all to freely read. I suspect that my decision to adopt a membership model has in part contributed to a slight decline in website traffic. No doubt, the explosion of genAI tools is also culpable. On the plus side, at least now I know who's consuming my content and becoming a true fan. (As an added benefit, tech companies cannot gobble up new posts to further train their AI models.)
I couldn't be happier with the resutls.
In the weeks after my site relaunch, a few people expressed confusion about the posts they could view. Hopefully, the new emojis next to each one make it clear. From my FAQ:
I see an emoji near a blog post. What does it signify?
🌍 = Public content that anyone can view without signing up for any plan.
🎁 = Reading the whole post requires creating a Free account & logging in to it.
➕ = Reading the whole post requires creating a Plus account & logging in to it.
⭐️ = Reading the whole post requires creating a Premium account & logging in to it.
Along these lines, the revamped Index page lets people see the posts associated with each tier.
I'm still noodling with subscription tiers. This much I know: I haven't quite nailed the right price and features for each one. I suspect that I'll tinker with them over the next few months.
Ghost Support
In a word, it's fantastic. On a few occasions, I sent the folks an email and found their responses genuinely helpful. And I love Ghost's glorious alerts.
Phil Simon
Parting Thoughts
Ghost isn't the best alternative for every WordPress user. For me, though, it made sense to pull the trigger when I did. A little more than a month later, I'm ecstatic with my decisions to move to it and to hire Spectral Web Services.
I expected a few bumps during the migration. I'm still squashing the random bug, but the time and money spent were well worth it.
Finally, I've written more posts on my site in the last month than I have in the past year. The simple reason: Ghost has rekindled my love of blogging. I'm no longer battling a bloated WordPress theme and legacy tech. Less friction means more time getting my ideas out there.
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