Why I Left WordPress For Ghost CMS (Honest Comparison)

Why the Shift Away From WordPress?

WordPress has been the backbone of the internet for years, and it remains an incredibly powerful platform. But for content creators who primarily blog and send newsletters, it can start to feel like driving an SUV when all you need is a sports car. That's the analogy that best captures why Ghost is gaining serious traction among publishers.

Ghost currently has around 3 million users, and the list of companies relying on it is genuinely impressive. Buffer, Unsplash, DuckDuckGo, Duolingo, and even OpenAI all use Ghost for their blogs. When you see that caliber of brand choosing Ghost over WordPress, it's worth paying attention.

The core difference comes down to focus. WordPress has evolved into a do-everything platform — e-commerce, sales funnels, learning management systems, you name it. Ghost, on the other hand, is laser-focused on one thing: helping creators publish content and build an audience. If your needs extend beyond blogging and memberships, WordPress is still the better bet. But if publishing is your primary goal, Ghost deserves a serious look.

Similarities Between WordPress and Ghost

Before diving into the differences, it's worth noting that Ghost and WordPress share more DNA than you might expect. Ghost is fully open source, with its entire codebase available on GitHub. You can download it, install it on your own server, and run it however you like — just like WordPress.

Ghost also offers managed hosting for people who don't want to deal with server configuration, mirroring the WordPress.com model. On the theme side, there's a selection of free and premium themes available, plus you can customize existing themes or build your own from scratch.

The admin interface will feel familiar to WordPress users too. Posts, pages, and tags are all organized in a similar way. The backend is essentially a streamlined version of what you're used to — same concepts, just with the complexity stripped away. You won't feel like you're learning an entirely new platform.

Where Ghost Wins: Speed, Newsletters, and a Modern Tech Stack

Ghost's biggest advantage is that it's purpose-built for content creators. Blogging and newsletters aren't afterthoughts bolted on through plugins — they're core features baked into the platform. You can sign up subscribers, segment your audience, and send email newsletters without installing a single extension or paying for a third-party email service.

Under the hood, Ghost runs on a modern Node.js tech stack, which translates to noticeably faster performance. WordPress users routinely spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours optimizing page speed with caching plugins, CDNs, and image compression tools. Ghost is fast right out of the box. The admin panel loads instantly, settings pop open without delay, and the overall experience feels snappy in a way that WordPress rarely matches without significant optimization.

The built-in membership and subscription system is another standout. You can restrict posts to free members, paid subscribers, or specific pricing tiers — all without any added cost. Want a lower-priced general membership and a premium mastermind tier? Ghost handles that natively. Doing the same on WordPress would require a membership plugin, a payment gateway, and hours of configuration.

The Ghost Editor: Fast, Clean, and Distraction-Free

If you've ever found yourself frustrated by Gutenberg (WordPress's block editor), the Ghost editor will feel like a breath of fresh air. It's a clean, distraction-free writing environment where you can just start typing without navigating through block menus and sidebars.

Adding media is straightforward — upload images directly or pull from a built-in Unsplash integration. Text formatting is intuitive: select text, choose your heading size, apply bold or italic, add a quote. It's the kind of editor that gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing.

Ghost's card system is where things get interesting. Hit the slash key (familiar to Gutenberg users) to access cards for images, markdown, code snippets, bookmarks, YouTube embeds, Twitter embeds, and more. The callout card is particularly useful for highlighting important information in your posts. You can even save any card — or an entire post layout — as a reusable snippet, making it easy to maintain consistent formatting across your site.

The sidebar gives you quick access to SEO metadata, social sharing cards for Twitter and Facebook, scheduling options, and newsletter settings. Every post can double as an email newsletter with a single toggle. You can preview how it'll look on desktop, mobile, email, and social media all from one screen.

Ghost Managed Hosting and Support

Ghost's managed hosting starts at just $9 per month for up to 500 subscribers, scaling up to the Creator plan at $25 per month with additional features. For what you get — a membership site with built-in email delivery, no plugin management, and automatic updates — it's genuinely good value. Trying to replicate this on WordPress for $25 a month would be a stretch.

One of the biggest conveniences of managed hosting is that Ghost handles email deliverability for you. No SMTP plugins to configure, no Amazon SES setup, no dealing with DNS records for email authentication. It just works.

The support team has been responsive and genuinely helpful — real people giving detailed, thoughtful answers rather than copy-paste responses. And importantly, you're never locked in. Ghost lets you export all your content as a single JSON file from the Labs section of the admin panel, which you can then import into a self-hosted Ghost instance whenever you want.

Where WordPress Still Wins

For all of Ghost's strengths, WordPress still dominates in several critical areas. The ecosystem is the most obvious one. If you can imagine a feature for your website, there's almost certainly a WordPress plugin that does it. That kind of extensibility simply doesn't exist in Ghost's universe yet. The same goes for integrations — while Ghost has some, WordPress connects natively with virtually every service and platform you can think of.

Using Ghost means relying more heavily on third-party services to fill gaps that WordPress handles natively. Comments are a prime example. Ghost has no built-in comment system, so you'll need to bring in something like Disqus (free but shares your traffic data), Discourse (powerful but requires its own server), or Cove (purpose-built for Ghost at $16/month). These costs add up, especially for someone just getting started.

Customization is another area where WordPress has a clear edge, particularly for non-developers. Ghost doesn't have the visual page builders that WordPress users take for granted — tools like Elementor that let you drag and drop your way to a custom layout. Editing a Ghost theme means downloading it and working with code. You don't need to be a developer per se, but you do need to be comfortable with basic HTML and CSS. WordPress is simply more accessible to people who never want to look at a line of code.

The Verdict: Which Platform Should You Choose?

Ghost is the right choice if your primary goal is publishing content, building an email list, and offering paid subscriptions. It's fast, focused, and remarkably well-designed for that specific use case. The editor is a joy to use, newsletters are built in, and the managed hosting is affordable for what you get.

WordPress is still the better option if you need e-commerce, complex sales funnels, learning management systems, or extensive visual customization without touching code. Its ecosystem is unmatched, and for businesses that need their website to do more than publish content, that flexibility matters.

The two platforms aren't really competitors so much as they serve different needs. If you've been wrestling with WordPress plugins, speed optimization, and maintenance headaches just to run a blog, Ghost might be exactly the streamlined alternative you've been looking for. It's free to try — either install it locally or take advantage of the 14-day free trial on their managed hosting platform.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.