I’ve been following a new blogging platform that’s been really rocking over the last few years, it’s called Ghost, and I wrote more about it in this post on Sunday. While the platform launched in 2013 it really starting seeing meteoric growth over the last few years.
Ghost has a pretty cool founding story, it was actually launched on Kickstarter where they had an initial goal of raising £25,000 and ended up raising £196,362 (about $250,000 USD).
Fast-forward to today and Ghost has raised $7.3M and has over 2,000,000 blogs on the platform with thousands launching every week. What really sets Ghost apart from WordPress is the lack of bloat. WordPress gives you the kitchen sink when it comes to legacy code and features that are in there and have really stacked up over time…which means, it just can’t compete when it comes to speed.
Ghost is ~19 times faster than WordPress but it’s also not quite as plug-and-play. Ghost really is a blogging platform for people with some dev chops, or a dev team to manage it. That being said, I’ve used Thesis for a long time now, which is a WordPress theme aimed at devs who want to get in and tweak the theme code until things are pixel perfect so I dig that.
As I learn more and more about Ghost, I get more excited about it and now I can honestly say I’m leaning towards making the move. What always makes me super nervous about making a change like this is the impact it could have on my search rankings. I’ve been writing this blog for 13 years and have a ton of posts ranking for a wide range of terms. It’s always amazing to me how some posts I wrote 5+ years ago still get traffic every single day.
So I don’t want to lose that. All that being said, it looks like Ghost has done a really good job in making I pretty darn easy to move from WordPress. They have a DIY guide on their site, but if you sign up for the Ghost(Pro) Standard Annual they’ll do it for free.
While I’m still not 100% sure I’ll make the move, like the title of my post says, I am thinking more seriously about this. If I do make the move you can bet I’ll share all the details of the journey here along the way.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to chat with some people at Ghost to walk through the steps in more detail. So nothing is happening yet, but I am getting deeper into research mode. More to come! 👻
