Hi everyone, I’m running a website using Ghost CMS that focuses on restaurant-related content, mainly Texas Roadhouse menus, offers, and reviews. Everything had been working smoothly for months, but after updating to the latest Ghost version, I started running into several technical issues with how my website is displaying and handling posts. I’ve tried troubleshooting on my own, but I’m running out of ideas and could really use some help.
The main issue is with my theme. I use a slightly customized version of the Casper theme, and since the update, some of the dynamic elements no longer render correctly. For example, featured images and post excerpts don’t appear on the homepage anymore. I checked my theme’s index.hbs and post-card.hbs files, and the Handlebars helpers look fine, but Ghost seems to ignore some of them. Clearing the cache and restarting the instance didn’t fix it.
Another issue I noticed is with the navigation and footer. The custom links I added through the Ghost admin panel occasionally disappear or revert to older configurations. It’s like the settings aren’t being saved properly. This happens randomly—sometimes they appear as expected, other times the menu is completely blank. I’ve checked the database connection, and everything looks normal there. Could this be a caching or configuration sync issue?
Performance has also become inconsistent. My website used to load in under two seconds, but now the pages occasionally stall, especially when loading large blog posts or image-heavy content. I checked the server logs, and I’m seeing intermittent 504 errors. I’m running Ghost behind Nginx on a VPS, so I’m wondering if there’s a mismatch between the new Ghost version and my current Node.js setup. I haven’t upgraded Node in a while, so that might be a factor.
On top of that, email notifications for new subscribers stopped working. I was using the built-in Ghost members feature with Mailgun integration, but now new sign-ups aren’t triggering confirmation emails. Mailgun logs show the requests aren’t even reaching their system, which makes me think Ghost isn’t sending them out at all. I double-checked my config.production.json, and the API key and domain are correct.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues after a Ghost update? Should I roll back to a previous version or try reinstalling my theme from scratch? I’d also love to know if there’s a best practice for making custom themes more update-proof, because I’m starting to think my modifications might be conflicting with Ghost’s newer handlebars or JSON structures. Any guidance would be appreciated—I really want to get my Texas Roadhouse website back to running smoothly again. Sorry for the long post!