I’ve been writing this blog for almost thirteen years, and for the vast majority of that time it has been on WordPress. Overall I like WordPress, they have an amazing bevy of both themes and plugins and it’s easy to customize without writing code.
At the same time, since I’ve been coding for 20+ years, I choose a more developer-friendly theme called Thesis which makes it easy to jump in with CSS and Javascript and tinker around.
Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more about Ghost, a new(ish) blogging platform that’s a bit more developer-centric and honestly just feels a bit more modern and slick than WordPress. Don’t worry WordPress, I still love you, but I have to say, the shiny new toy that is Ghost looks oh so enticing.
Companies like Apple and NASA already use Ghost and more and more people are giving it a try, there’s a definite buzz going on about it. So this weekend I decided to create an account and take a peek, and well, it’s freaking awesome and, uh, I think I’m in love.
So what makes Ghost so interesting? (to me at least?)
This isn’t meant to be a detailed review so I’ll just share a few bullet points on a few of the features I think are pretty rad:
- Super clean and powerful editor – the WordPress editor is great, don’t get me wrong, and the changes they’ve made over the last two years are big. That being said, I think the Ghost editor is one of those things you have to see/use to believe, and it’s the best I’ve ever seen…it makes me jealous as I write this.
- Build-in membership, newsletter, and subscriptions – what would take a hodgepodge of plugins playing nicely together to accomplish in WordPress is built-into Ghost, and it’s the cleanest implementation I’ve seen. I really like the idea of taking something that would usually involve picking three different third-party solutions and making them all available through the core platform itself.
- 19x faster than WordPress – okay, I’m going to get a bit geeky but this is a probably the killer feature, Ghost is a headless CMS with Node.js and rest APIs. Didn’t catch all that? No worries – just know that it is almost twenty times faster than WordPress. Page speed is a critical component in Google’s ranking algorithm so this is pretty darn important.
- Built in best-in-class SEO – on that note, there’s no need to install any third party SEO plugins like the famous “All in One SEO Pack” for WordPress. Ghost has best-in-class SEO for free, baked in, out of the gate.
Oh and if you think I’m gushing about Ghost because they’re a new sponsor or something, they aren’t. I don’t know anyone over there and as you’ll notice, there are no affiliate links in this article so I could care less if you use it or not.
I can tell you, I think Ghost is pretty amazing and I do think it could give WordPress a run for its money. As for me moving this blog over? Nah – that’s way too big of an undertaking with too many SEO risks to be worth it IMO…but if I ever start a second blog, I’m going Ghost and not looking back. 👻
