Wordpress to Ghost - my experience

Developer help Migrations
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I moved my mid-sized, decade-old, site from Wordpress to Ghost about a month ago. I’ve written an account of what was involved … this is not a line by line description of what to do, but a more general guide to some of the pitfalls and problems I encountered.

Amongst other things, I discuss:

  • Choice of hosted Ghost provider (MagicPages)
  • Dealing with ~1000 footnotes
  • Third-party commenting system (FastComments)
  • Third-party contact form (Letterbird)
  • Problems - gallery plugins, SSO and missing information in subscribers imported from WP
  • Tags and categories
  • Link checking (Lychee)
  • Writing (Obsidian)

It took more effort than the official guide suggests, but a lot less than I feared. If you’re thinking of making the move, it might be helpful. However, if the mention of JSON, scp, regex or code-injection leaves you perplexed then hire a Ghost expert to help as you’ll probably need it!

Good luck!

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Thanks for sharing the insights from your journey.

Ahhh, footnotes! Those things. They are so important, and like you mentioned in your post, you would have thought that given Ghost has a strong focus on writing that it would have been something worth considering from the outset.

Like you, I moved across from Wordpress (a few years ago now) and couldn’t be happier. For me, the removal of all the Wordpress rubbish has been a godsend.

Hosting and the speed of page rendering was ultra important as well - I ended up going with Ghost(Pro).

All the best!

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