WordPress can be annoying with its constant need for updates and threat of malware and spam. So I had to look to see if Ghost was a better alternative.
🎯 In short, if you’re a creator with an existing audience and want more flexibility around the media that you use and your payment terms Ghost is to a good solution. It is better if you want not much control over your design as well.
- If you’re an affiliate, ghost is a bad solution because you can’t easily import, affiliate links or tables, etc.
- For a personal brand, Ghost could be a good solution, but I personally think Substack is better. The reason is Ghost has almost no organic exposure.
- If you are a developer type, then you can ignore this article, since most of these things can be fixed manually by yourself.
- For company blogs, I think those would not be very suitable. It is more geared around individual creators rather than a company that needs to pound out a lot of content and who can leverage their own email marketing systems.
Anyway, here’s the detail on the pros and cons.
💪 The Good
I found that there are some great things about Ghost.
- Less threats. Because it’s somewhat Apple-like closed environment, it doesn’t have as many threats as WordPress does in terms of leaky, plug-ins or exploits. It helps you sleep better at night for sure.
- Email marketing built-in. It’s nice that you don’t have to pay for a separate email marketing platform you can use their own system. You can choose whether or not every time you post to email all your subscribers, so you don’t have to blast everybody every time.
- Ability to charge subscribers. You can create premium, supporter plans, or as many paid access plans as you want. This would be useful if you’re a creator who needs more customizability then something like Substack, tor example.
- Medium like creator experience. It seems to have taken inspiration from a lot of mediums interface, with some use a friendly blocks that can be input it for YouTube, Spotify, and other embed links.
- Technically fast. It’s sped up my website loading time from over 2 seconds to just under half a second. It’s quick, and I guess that’s because the developers have rebuilt something like WordPress from the ground up.
👻 The Bad
There are some serious drawbacks of Ghost, though.
- Migrating is not easy. The actual migration was not very straightforward. Because things work differently on ghost, it’s not super simple to import all your posts with the same tags, dates and images. Expect a lot of technical work here.
- Complicated links. It’s really hard to put no follow links in or links that are marked as affiliate or sponsored. This is considered best practice in SEO so kind of important to get right. There’s a workaround which means you create an HTML first and then you input it into the article, which is a total pain.
- No page nesting. It’s actually gear towards making every page and nested. Again that seems to support creators who don’t need complicated nesting for any reason.
- No tables. This was surprising, but I didn’t really support creating tables. you have to create them elsewhere, and then add the HTML to the page.
- Poor design control. There’s no Elementor for Ghost. You need to either buy a premium theme or have someone develop one for you by hand.