Ghost; too good to be true?

Using Ghost
1

Greetings,
I am currently a very casual user of Wordpress with ConvertKit and Yoast and I’m looking to simplify things a bit…

First, price-wise, my hosting, CK and Yoast amount to about US $650 per year. From what I can see, the equivalent Ghost site (for my current level of subscribers (0)) could be had for $9 per month.

Now the questions:

  • Do I need to be concerned about SEO to a Yoast-level when using Ghost?
  • Do I need ConvertKit? It appears that Ghost allows me to do the same things (multiple newsletters, landing pages, etc.)

And the strategy…
I used to think that what I was writing was a blog but it seems that now it would be better described as a bunch of long-form articles that I can gather together to distribute as newsletters.

Any thoughts on the “too good to be true” aspects would be very helpful thanks. And also the questions. I will try to read more to better understand how I should describe what I am building, the terms confuse me sometimes.

Many thanks.

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Howdy! Welcome (maybe) to Ghost!

I think the odds are pretty good that you’re going to want /some/ feature that needs the Creator level, like being able to load a custom theme. Maybe not, and certainly you could start at Basic and upgrade later.

Ghost has pretty good SEO out of the box, but unlike Yoast, it won’t tell you to make titles longer/shorter/whatever. But you could sign up for AHREFs or similar and get that sort of reporting (and the free tier is pretty good!).

Ghost Pro hosting includes sending email newsletters. (Pricing is based on number of members, not numbers of emails sent - for the daily newsletters, it’s a steal, especially.) Ghost doesn’t have an email drip (or other single-user emails) built in, although there are tutorials out there for setting that up with Zapier or similar.

You mentioned multiple newsletters. That’s definitely possible on Ghost, but check how many your hosting setup includes. Another option is one newsletter with member labels to segment who gets what.

Lots of people both publish their writing on their website AND send it out as an email. Ghost does both pretty seamlessly. When you publish, you can choose web only, web and email, or email only.

Ghost doesn’t have an email digest built in. (You mentioned sending multiple articles at once.) Some people who don’t want to send one article at a time send out a newsletter with links and excerpts/abstracts to their articles (assembled by hand or using bookmark cards). I’m also just finishing work for a client where I auto-generate her nightly newsletter email from everything published the previous day. That’s not built into Ghost, but I’m hoping to offer it as an add-on soon.

I’ve got an article (also sent in my newsletter!) about some differences between Ghost and WP here: Is Ghost the right choice?

There’s also the official ghost.org comparison: Ghost: The simple, powerful WordPress alternative (although I think there are a few spots where tradeoffs are presented as benefits…)

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Hi Cathy,
Thank you so much for this, much to think on…

I have a few other questions / conjectures, if I may.

  • regarding SEO, if I keep articles to the lengths suggested by Yoast and write normally using the keywords I’m interested in writing about, I’m assuming that Ghost’s built-in SEO and Google’s ever-smarter algorithm will take care of the rest.
  • I think a curated newsletter would be the best for me, I can do that manually.
  • If I kick the tyres hard for two weeks, build membership tiers, etc. can I then migrate my Wordpress pages, posts, etc into that without breaking anything?
  • After reading and reflecting, I think I just need to build a well-organised repository of articles with newsletter access for those who live in their emails rather than on the web.
  • Probably have newsletters and commenting as paid features

It’s starting to take form…

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Content and theme are separate, so probably! :)

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Now the tyre-kicking questions begin… ;-)

I would like to use Alegreya fonts on my site, there are four: Alegreya, Alegreya Sans, Alegreya SC and Alegreya Sans SC. When I add them using Code Injection will the choices appear in the font dropdown (do I need to specify Header or Body for this to happen?) or do I need to specify which weight, etc in the CSS file?

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They will not appear in the dropdown. But you can add them in code injection (assuming they’re Google Fonts, or with some trickery even if they aren’t) and then override the font variables. This is theme-specific, but if you link your site someone can help. :) --font-serif and --font-sans-serif are good guesses, but not 100% consistent.

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My tyre-kicking site

The fonts are Google fonts and I have followed the instructions to paste everything into the Code injection for header. Just haven’t done anymore because I’m not sure of the next steps.

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It’s a learning curve but, like most things, once you understand the thinking that underlies the product, things make sense. For example, who’d have thought that a newsletter is a post (not the same as a post is a newsletter) but it makes perfect sense, actually…

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OK, great. So keep the link parts, but you can cut all the stuff that’s defining styles. You don’t need them.

Instead, add (between the <style></style> the following:

:root {
  --font-sans: Alegreya, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

That’ll cause Alegreya to be the first choice font for all places that Ghost is currently using ‘font-sans’, which looks like almost everywhere. You can also redefine --font-serif in a similar way if needed.

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