Migrating WP to Ghost Starter Plan: preparation, execution & what to expect

Developer help Migrations
1

Hi all,

decided I’m going all in with Ghost after 19 years of WordPress. It’s an opportunity to change flavour and do my readers a favour by presenting my writing in a more legible form. Problems:

  1. embedded pdfs: they were expedient on squarewhiteworld.com, the WP weblog, to enable legibility—theme there, going with the title, totally black, offwhite text; I can now remove them. However, at what stage?
  2. if before migrating where does Ghost put all the newly migrated—in this case—2,080 posts and 332 pages? Are they easily edited in bulk there?
  3. to fit the ouside-light.ghost.io tag / category architecture (organised into collections) all posts and pages will need to be re-tagged. Will the Ghost editor only enable this function one by one?
  4. if I have to go one-by-one for re-tagging, am I better off uploading posts & pages one-by-one: if it’s going to take a long time ghost-side am I better to do it while preparing materials WP-side? in which case, the migration tool … well, my additional worry is of course handling images and other media in addition to texts … and one more issue: how best to handle special WP block-editor formatting, for example, lineated texts, like “Verse”?

I’d appreciate any suggestions and recommendations.

Best,
Simon

2

Hi Simon,
when Ghost Concierge migrates your Wordpress they move them over to Ghost in one step, so they will show up in Ghost directly.

Tagging is problematic, Ghost tag-management could use some improvements.

What I do for my clients is to store all posts unique “Ghost ID” and headline in a Baserow database, and then use drop-downs in Baserow to assign tags. Then I write the tags back to Ghost using the unique ID for the post.

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Having posts in Baserow also makes it possible to AI-tag the posts, since you have 2k+ posts that might be helpful. “Assign this blog post into one of four categories based on the following criteria…”

3

Baserow sounds a promising route to take, however, after I have successfully migrated: issue I have is how much preparation on WP-side to do and of what kind before deploying migration tool; baserow looks like a clean-up job, albeit a good solution. And it does give me an indication of what I might be facing Ghost-side, thanks!

4

I’m guessing you’re using the API for that. The OP said they’re on the starter plan, which means no integrations.

5

Hi Cathy, I saw your name come up with regard to complex WP migration, where you replied you were chocka March - April; going by your reply here, is the solution a plan upgrade either to include integrations or engage concierge (or both)? Or, from my existing plan, is that the long migrate? and, in the case of the latter, is it best to prep WP and exe migrate tool . . . or, since re-tagging looks to be necessary, plod on step by step?

6

Upgrade to one month Creator, do the tagging and general cleanup, downgrade.
Totally worth it if you want to tag 2k+ posts…

7

awesome … will do!

Are you part of the team?

Best,
Simon

8

Hey @outsidelight !

The new WP tool built into the import/export section does not change the WP site content (unlike the old WP migration plugin), so you can safely run it and see if you like what it does, at which point you’ll have a better idea what your needs are.

Neither mheland nor I work for Ghost. Most of the forum is community members helping each other out. :flexed_biceps: :slight_smile:

9

thanks Cathy!

I emailed Ghost re suggestion I upgrade for concierge and cleanup . . . as yet no reply.

Is it normal to receive no reply? It’s like I might have asked too many questions. (There goes another one.)

Best,
Simon

10

The folks in the concierge group are often pretty busy, and based on forum timestamps, you’ve given them maybe a day to reply. (And on a Monday, when they’re probably dealing with their backlog from over the weekend.)

I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting concierge help with migration on the starter plan. Their website says the concierge migration is for folks who are committing to a year at creator or greater, and that isn’t you. (Which makes sense - if your migration isn’t something that can be done with the automated tools, then you’d need to be spending enough money with them to make it reasonable for a human to do the custom work needed.) I think mheland suggested that you could upgrade for a month so that you could use the api to do your own migration/retagging, not because it’d get you a free migration.

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