Moving from Ghost to WordPress

Using Ghost
1

I’m wondering if anyone has left (or is contemplating leaving) Ghost and return to WordPress?

I left WordPress and moved over to Ghost a few months ago. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ghost for its speed, ease of use, membership/subscription, etc options. However, I’m missing certain key functionalities that WordPress afforded. For instance, I need to have different Schema for all my pages. When I used WordPress + customisable schema, I was able to trigger a Knowledge Panel, which greatly improved my site’s rankings and visibility. However, ever since I joined Ghost, my knowledge panel, sitelinks, rich snippets, ranking/visibility, etc have all suffered/disappeared, which is just too much to bear.

I love how Ghost is so easy to use, but I desperately need those other things. I love Ghost and would love to stay, but after months of trying (I’m not an IT person), I do not see how I can make this work :( Also, I’m not sure if Ghost would incorporate schema, linked data features, among others natively into their system, so that I can get those things I have lost back.

Are there others who are also contemplating moving back to WordPress? I’d love to know your (constructive) thoughts on this.

Thanks.

2

No experience with moving back, but make sure the impact is really due to Ghost, not because of changey by Google. Rich snippets like HowTo and FAQ for example is something that Google has removed/will remove.

There is also a lot you can do by modifying your theme. If you know in detail what you want, there are experts that might be able to help you.

1 Like
3

Roy, when you moved, did you make sure all your old links still worked? So for example, if your WP posts were at /wp-content/2022/10/my-post-title, then you need to either have a redirects.yaml file that causes Ghost to redirect requests for that URL to the new one (which might be /my-post-title/ or /blog/my-post-title/ depending on how you set it up), or you need a routes.yaml file that exactly replicates the old site structure.

I’ve seen enough users botch the migration and lose their domain ranking because of it when they break their inbound links, that I figured it was worth asking!

1 Like
4

I moved several back to WordPress.

Unfortunately I found Ghost too restrictive and not suitable for large publications.

I too love Ghost and continue to use it on smaller sites, it’s perfect for simple blogs or publications that don’t require additional functionalities out of the box.

2 Likes
5

I have all of those schemas with Ghost. Which is not the problem. Ok, maybe it’s not so easy like with Wordpress. Because there are no plugins. But it’s also its biggest strength.

With enough research you can get the same result, even better because Ghost is ten times faster than Wordpress.

I would start with a table of contents tutorial, in order to get back the sitelinks & more.

Schemas are quite easy. They can be injected in the header or footer, or even in the body of the page thanks to the html widget.

1 Like
6

That’s a good point @christhaefner It has been very chaotic with all the Google changes the past few weeks :(

1 Like
7

Hi @Cathy_Sarisky Yes, I painfully took care of all the urls to make sure the transition was as smooth as possible.

8

Yes, I love Ghost too. However, the move has severely affected my rankings. This has been interesting: my website speed has improved, but rankings has almost disappeared.

I desperately wish Ghost introduces support for all (or at least major) schema types, internal linking, linked data, and perhaps keyword search too.

9

Anything interesting in the Google search console reports? Pages not indexed or marked as not mobile accessible, for instance?

10

@block I too manually insert all the schema code, which is time consuming, but I guess it gives you more control.

Could you please explain how ToC would help with sitelinks?

Yes, I do wanna stick with Ghost and make my site stronger than what WP ever was!

11

GSC has been quite up and down. I now have ~50 urls that “need improvement”: see here

12

Here’s some things to check for CLS problems. Portal and the announcements bar are prime suspects.

13

Out of interest, could you advise on your definition of large?

14

Over 3k tags large, not that ghost couldn’t handle this, but for our use case Ghost was too restrictive.

15
1 Like
16

Wowzers! In saying that though, I had around 2,000 and decided it wasn’t required to perform such granularity and reduced it down to 10-12.

17

We cover stocks so each company gets its own tag hence the sheer number required.

1 Like
18

Actually, my experience was a bit different.

I started with Ghost and it was going really well for a new site, getting over 1,000 impressions on GSC a day. Then, suddenly, it just dropped and I was down to 10 or so a day. So, I thought about what you’re considering and switched back to WordPress. But, honestly, it didn’t make a difference, even though I was using all the SEO tools etc.

When I switched back to Ghost, I noticed something weird. I’m not 100% sure it was the cause, but for some reason, my site lost the https://www in front of the URL somewhere along the line, no idea when this happened. Like, it went from https://www.xpgained.com to just https://xpgained.com. I think this messed up my rankings because all my sitemaps were off. Anyway, when I moved back to Ghost, the ‘www.’ came back and my views started to pick up again.

I would definitely look at something like this before moving back to Wordpress.

19

Out of interest, what functionality do you get out of the box to triumph Ghost? A naked Wordpress is like useless for almost anything without any additional plugins :thinking:

1 Like
20

The biggest frustration is the character limit on tag descriptions, no HTML allowed, no way to add custom fields etc. Our site is very light, with hardly any plugins in use. We have the option to be more flexible in presenting company data, with Ghost this is impossible.

I do prefer Ghost and continue to use on a couple of smaller websites.