Moving to Ghost

Using Ghost
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Still kicking tyres but definitely on the way to deciding to move everything to Ghost.

I have a site on the url I would like to use as my Ghost Custom Domain. Am I correct in thinking that if I export all the pages, posts and tags from the existing site, get them all cleaned up and published on my Ghost installation then I can just assign the original url to Ghost as the custom domain and voilà! I have a brand new site on a brand new platform with an editor I enjoy using…

Is it really that simple?

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In its essence, yes.

Export content from your old platform, import it to Ghost – do some DNS magic. Tada :tada:

There are some “gotchas” you should be aware of. I always like to point people to this post by @Cathy_Sarisky:

If yo’re moving from a different platform you’ll probably want to have a look at routing and redirections as well, so that old links don’t break.

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Thanks for this. I have done a major clean-up of the old site, exported but then receive a red notice upon import. It reads, “, cannot fetch db”.

I am still on my trial period, do I need to be a paid-up member to import?

Edit to add:
Removed the pdf file and some font zip files then tried uploading only the json file but it is still unsuccessful.

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Solved!

I had used Categories as menu items (aggregators) on my Wordpress site and the theme there, Generate Press, allowed me to have long descriptions, which I had optimised for SEO, more than 350 words.

Converted them to tags then discovered that Ghost tags have a description limit of 500 characters. Deleted the WP tags and imported the json file successfully.

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