Last year I wrote about a cool new blogging platform called Ghost that I am thinking of moving this blog to. The more I learned about Ghost, the more serious I got about making the move.
So now, here we are, a new year and I’m still on WordPress. I’ll be honest, I have stage fright, and while I still really want to make the move because Ghost just looks so freaking amazing, there are a few things still holding me back.
Here’s what’s stopping me from moving from WordPress to Ghost:
- Potential losing 13+ years of SEO – I have been writing this blog for 13 years and while I know the move to Ghost is supposed to be pretty seamless. We all know things can and do go wrong in the SEO world all the time. I’m still consulting SEO experts but not many have experience moving from WordPress to Ghost given how new Ghost is and given how much traffic I get through search, losing that and having to rebuild 13 years of work would be, uh, really bad.
- Lack of phone support – right now Ghost only offers email support and while their support has been awesome at answering questions so far, it can take an hour or more to hear back from support. If something goes wrong and my blog is down this will be the longest hour of my life. What I really like about WPEngine, my current managing hosting provider is that I can call them and get someone on the phone almost immediately. Honestly I’d pay an extra $50/month for phone support at Ghost but it’s just not an option right now unfortunately.
- Limited 3rd party plugins – it’s no secret that WordPress has a massive ecosystem surrounding it. This makes sense because WordPress has been around while dinosaurs were still roaming the earth. Okay, not that long but it has been around for a while. Ghost is still relatively new so there just aren’t as many cool add-ons, at the same time, do I really need them, so much is built in? This one might not be as much of a deal-breaker for now.
So that’s where I’m at, still on the fence but continuing to do research. I feel incredibly lucky to have a blog that is continuing to go strong after so many years. I love my readers and am still in awe of how many amazing sponsors I have. The old saying, “if it’s not broken don’t fix it,” sticks in my mind, but this new cool shiny thing called Ghost is still top-of-mind.
What do you think I should do?
Agree with you.
You got the courage to try ghost, i used wp on many sites and can tell you can launch a site every 1 hour on wordpress, jooma you’ll pass hours to understand the logic, drupal not tested yet, ghost, the new trend, thanks to nodejs, and nodejs may replace php in future wp 😉 , so if all is working it’s okay, just keep updating the security plugins, and why complicate things if you use it only to publish articles ?? remove the not mandatory plugins , elementor is a try if you are looking to get a wow moment, but if you are fine with current theme just concentrate on publications.
but I encourage you to continue explore ghost and don’t stop, look at the single page possibility, mixing it with react / angular… and don’t be afraid of loosing the seo stuf…