Introduction: Why Look Beyond WordPress?
What's going on everybody? It's Dave here from profitable.tools where I show you how to start an online business with off-the-shelf software, not expensive developers. And on this channel, I'll admit I've been a little bit heavily focused on WordPress. Well, that's going to change. I'm still going to talk about WordPress, of course. It's a huge, important part of my life. Honestly, it's what I use to make my living. But I'm getting a lot more feedback like this comment from Michael, who said, "I want to learn more about non-WordPress options for building a blog. WordPress makes me want to throw my MacBook out the window or at least make a video on predictions about the future of websites and blogging because WordPress definitely is not it." Well, that was a great suggestion, Michael, and I'm going to do that. That's what this video is. Let's talk about the future of blogging.
Meet Ghost: The Purpose-Built Blogging Platform
This is Ghost, and Ghost has about three million users right now building blogs. Now, unlike WordPress, Ghost is dedicated towards blogging. Now that's kind of funny to say because WordPress was supposed to be dedicated to blogging as well, but it's been around long enough and it's got such an open infrastructure that over time, it really has become like a sports utility vehicle. You can haul your kids around, throw a couch in the back seat, hook up a trailer, throw some canoes in there, put your bikes up on top. Really, WordPress will do whatever you need it to do, but it's not necessarily the best tool for winning a race, right? If you want to win a race, you'll probably drive a sports car, not an SUV.
So that's where Ghost comes into play. It doesn't try to do everything. It's meant for bloggers. If you want to do e-commerce or do sales funnels, I wouldn't necessarily go with a Ghost website. But if you're a content creator looking for a place to host your blog and maybe offer subscriptions or a membership site to your users, well, then Ghost might be just what you're looking for.
I'm on the showcase page right here where you can see some of their more prominent users, and I was definitely surprised by how many big name companies were using this software. We've got Buffer, Unsplash, Ulysses, DuckDuckGo, Duolingo, OpenAI—the list literally just goes on and on. Fastmail, Airtable—I was blown away that these companies were not using WordPress and they were instead relying on Ghost for their blog.
Ghost & WordPress: The Core Similarities
So throughout the rest of this video, I'm going to give you a comparison between Ghost and WordPress. First, I'll show you the similarities. Then we'll talk about some of the things that Ghost has going for it over WordPress. And then let's reverse the tables, let's talk about what are the benefits of sticking with WordPress over Ghost.
All right, let's get into it by just kind of looking at the similarities. The first similarity I already pointed out, and that is that Ghost, like WordPress, is open source. Here is their GitHub repository. All of the source code is available for you to download. You can install it and host it on any server that you want. Also much like WordPress, there is a hosted, managed version, so if you don't want to deal with any of the server issues, you can simply sign up with Ghost and they will run the website for you.
Another similarity is that much like WordPress, there are themes for Ghost. Here are some of the free themes that are available. There's also a paid marketplace where you can go ahead and download premium themes. And also much like WordPress, you can customize an existing theme or even make your own from scratch. As an example, here's the back end of a Ghost website. You can see that I can easily upload my own theme, or if I want to customize an existing theme, I can simply click the triple dots here and download it and modify it.
Just quickly glancing at the back end of a Ghost website could kind of look like a heavily modified version of WordPress. Everything is organized in a very similar way. We have posts and pages. There's taxonomies in the form of tags, although there's no categories built right into the UI here. There are different ways to make collections of posts, but overall the back end is just a nice, streamlined version of kind of what you're used to. You don't feel lost or like you need to relearn software completely, just all of the complexities have been stripped away.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 1): Purpose-Built for Creators
So those are some of the ways that Ghost and WordPress are similar. Now let's talk about some of the strengths of Ghost that might lead you to choose this platform over WordPress.
So first of all, Ghost is tailor-made for a specific purpose. It's meant to help creators get their message out. So we've got blogging and newsletters at the forefront of Ghost. It makes it very easy to sign up subscribers and then keep them informed of your content. Doing that with WordPress is certainly possible and I've been doing it for years. However, it requires a lot of plugins, extra expenses, and additional setup that you just don't see with Ghost. So if you're looking for a purpose-built CMS that's meant for blogging and memberships and you need to be able to send out newsletters, Ghost checks all of those boxes.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 2): A Modern Tech Stack
So if you're still with me after that first point, and you're thinking, yeah, this all sounds good, what is the next reason to choose Ghost? Well, I would say it's the tech stack. Now that's a little bit weird to say if you're just the average person. You don't really care about the tech stack, you want to know how the software works. But think about it this way: WordPress has been around for a really long time. Now that's a good thing because WordPress is time-tested, it's obviously not going anywhere anytime soon, but it also means that it's built on old technology, whereas Ghost is built with a modern Node.js tech stack, which means it's super fast and it's super secure right out of the box.
WordPress users, ask any of them, they'll spend hundreds of dollars and lots and lots of hours trying to optimize their website just to get a fast loading time. With Ghost you really do not need to do that. It just works out of the box. I don't want to sound too much like an Apple commercial, but it really does just work.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 3): A Superior Content Editor
The next point I want to make is about the editor. Now, this might be a little bit controversial because some people love Gutenberg, the WordPress editor. However, I'm not one of those people. I find it to take too many clicks to accomplish just about anything. However, the Ghost editor is super fast. Let's go ahead and make a new post here. This is what the editor looks like. It's distraction-free and you can just begin writing if you want to do that right inside of your editor. You add your featured image right up here. You can click to upload an image or they even have a built-in Unsplash integration. Here's some tasty tacos, I'm going to add this to my blog post. There's alt text right here. I can go ahead and change the default text; it does pull it in from Unsplash for me. And then I can go ahead and add my post title.
Composing is super easy. Any text can be turned into a headline. Just select it and then choose either the large headline or the smaller headline. All of the text editing features that you expect to find are right there and super simple. Let's make some italic text and we can even add a quote.
But the fun doesn't end there. The Ghost editor has something called Cards. So you can either click the little plus button right here or, very familiar to Gutenberg users, hit the slash button. That will allow you to see all of the cards that are available, and there's quite a few right out of the box. Of course, all the basic ones that you'd expect to see are there, like adding an image or adding some Markdown if you want to share some code. You can add bookmarks, and it even integrates with Unsplash, Twitter, YouTube, so you can just literally paste in any URL and it'll populate correctly. For example, I've got a YouTube video saved in my clipboard right now. I'll just press Command+V to paste it in, and there we go, my video shows up perfectly. I also really love the callout card. Let's add one in here. I'll do backslash callout, and it just lets me add a little extra attention to a part of a blog post that I think is really important. The editing options are simple but look really nice. That keeps you from making too many mistakes. So let's change the background color and change the emoji.
Now, if I know that I want to use this callout over and over again on my website, I can save it in something called a Snippet. So I'll click on it, then choose this little icon right here, and I can give it a snippet name. Now that the snippet's saved, I can recall it by hitting backslash, type the name of the snippet, 'warning' in this case, and there we go, it's loaded in again. This will work on any page or post on my entire website. It's not limited to a single card either. I could go ahead and select this entire post and save it as a snippet. Maybe this is a template that I like to add to every single post. If I want to add it in, I can go ahead and hit backslash, type the name of the snippet, and there we go, it's added in again.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 4): Integrated Publishing & SEO
Overall, the editor is just super nice to use. It's really fast and not distracting at all. Much like WordPress, there is a sidebar over here that I can enable, and it's going to pop open some information about the post. So up top here, I can change the post URL, I can give it a publish date, I can organize it with tags, and I can restrict access here. So right now it's a public post, but I can also make it for members only. That's people who have subscribed to my newsletter. And I can also make it a paid members only or even limit that to specific tiers of subscribers. Let's say you had two tiers of pricing, one was lower priced for more regular people, and then you had a higher price private mastermind. Well, with this feature, you could go ahead and protect posts so that only the private mastermind people could see posts on your website. I think that's pretty cool. Again, no added cost, this is all built right into the platform.
Here's the SEO section that I was talking about. This is where we can change the metadata so we see what it looks like in a Google search result. By default, it's going to pull in the beginning of the post. And then we have a Twitter card as well as a Facebook card. They look very similar, but basically, this is what will show up when the post is shared on Facebook or Twitter.
The next section down here is for email newsletters, and that's because every single post can go out as an email newsletter. These are the settings for the email newsletter. We can change the subject so that it's not just the post title. You could have a different post title than you do subject line. And then you can send out a test email right here to make sure that the deliverability is good. If you need to add any code to your post, there is an option for that right here. Now there's also a site-wide option, so if you need to inject, say, a tracking script throughout your entire website, that is built right into the platform, again, no additional plugins needed.
When I'm ready to publish this post, I'll click on the publish button, and then I have the option to either publish it to the website or send it as an email, or do both. So if you just want to send out a weekly newsletter, you would choose this option over here. If you want to just post it to your website, it would be this one. And then if you want it to go out to everybody as well as be available on your website, you choose this option. If you're sending it out as an email, there is the same segmentation options that we saw earlier in terms of protecting the post. And then we can go ahead and schedule it. You can either set it to go live immediately or schedule it for some time in the future.
Another nice touch is the preview functionality. It kind of shows you what the post is going to look like inside a browser window and then gives you mobile responsive options as well as email and what it'll look like in social media posts, all in a single screen. It's just really nice and thought out.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 5): Admin UI & Managed Hosting
Overall, the admin area is just really fast and laid out really intelligently. You can see it just took me a second to click on the settings here. I can pop open into some design settings, go ahead and change the look and feel of my website without any real delay. No loading, everything's just popping up right away.
The site that I've been using throughout this video is on the Ghost managed hosting platform, which I'm finding to be really a good value. It starts out at just nine bucks if you're under 500 members, which they call subscribers, and that'll scale up from there. You can go up to the creator plan for just 25 bucks a month, and it adds in some additional functionality. I don't really like this tiered solution. I'd rather just pay either by usage or subscriber, but I understand that they're trying to support their platform and overall, I think this is a very, very affordable option. You know, 25 bucks for a membership site on WordPress is not going to get you very far, so I think comparably this is a pretty good deal.
If it sounds like I'm attracted to the managed hosting right now, it's just because of the simplicity of it. I like that they handle the email deliverability issue for you. There's no SMTP plugins to install and set up. You don't have to worry about setting up Amazon SES. Everything just kind of works for you right out of the gates. I also really like the support. I have had a few interactions where I've had questions about things. I had to try to redirect some urls. I went ahead and messaged their support, and they got back to me really, really quickly with very friendly and detailed responses. I can tell they're real people, not some kind of, you know, copy and paste reply, so that was really surprising and nice to see.
Ghost's Strengths (Part 6): Freedom & Data Portability
However, I do love the fact that I'm not locked in. If at some point in the future I want to migrate to a self-hosted instance, it's very easy to do so. Just click on the gear icon, go over to labs right here, and you can see that you can export all of your content, as they call it, to a single glorious JSON file. Click export, it downloads, then go ahead and set up your Ghost installation and then simply upload it right here, and you're ready to go.
WordPress's Strengths (Part 1): The Unmatched Ecosystem
All right, so as you can tell, Ghost has a lot going for it, and I am a fan, but I'm also a fan of WordPress and I've been using it for so long I feel at home inside of WordPress. So what are some strengths that WordPress has going for it that really Ghost just can't touch at this point?
The first has got to be the ecosystem. There's just so many extensions, so much documentation online, and so many ways to modify WordPress to get it to do whatever it is that you want. If you can think of something that you want to do on your website, you can probably find a plugin, download it, install it in just 5 or 10 minutes, and you'll have that feature added to your website. That ecosystem just does not exist in the Ghost universe.
WordPress's Strengths (Part 2): Integrations & Dependencies
WordPress doesn't just win when it comes to extensibility, it also wins when it comes to integrations. Now, there are quite a few integrations for Ghost, but usually just one or two for any particular category, and sometimes it actually requires Zapier to make the connection, so I don't really consider that to be a true integration. I'm sure this is going to change over time, but I'd love to see more and more integrations directly into Ghost.
On that same note, and somewhat coincidentally, you're going to have to rely on more third-party services if you use Ghost than if you use WordPress. Now we talked about how there's fewer integrations, but you need to rely on them more, so that becomes a little bit of a problem if you don't find the tool that you want to use specifically.
I'll give you an example: comments. There's no comment system inside of Ghost, so you're going to have to grab a third-party tool to go ahead and get comments up on your blog if that's something that you want to do. In my eyes, there's about three really good options here. One is the free version of Disqus. Now, the only problem with that is then you're sharing your traffic data with Disqus. Of course, they have paid plans as well, however, I'm not sure how much more private they are, I haven't really investigated it.
The next option would be Discourse, which would allow you to use this free and open source community software as a commenting system for your Ghost blog. I actually really like this idea because it allows you to have comments flow into other conversations where people can actually start their own conversations. But this requires a lot more setup. You're going to need another dedicated server running the Discourse software.
Another option is Cove, which is a purpose-built commenting tool for Ghost websites. You can see that the comments look really nice here. There's emojis and replies, everything looks really good, but it's another fee, right? This is going to cost you some money. It's not a ton of money, we're talking about 16 bucks a month, but it's definitely a cost to consider, especially if you're just getting started. These little fees can start to really add up and they get a little bit annoying, but it's not unique to the Ghost platform. You'll find this on just about any CMS. I know that Shopify definitely deals with this, as does WordPress. It's very easy to buy a WordPress plugin that then has an annual recurring fee. And even if you stick to plugins that have lifetime fees, they often are a lot more expensive than the annual ones, so you end up paying the same amount just over an extended period of time. Running a website is just expensive, there's no real way around it.
WordPress's Strengths (Part 3): Customization for Non-Coders
The last thing I want to talk about is how much easier it is to customize a WordPress website versus a Ghost website. So I'm speaking specifically to the people who are allergic to looking at code here. I'm not talking about developers, right? Because you don't need to be a developer to edit a Ghost website, but there's not as many nice visual tools to go in and change, say, the look of your header and footer like there is in the WordPress ecosystem. In fact, that's almost a downfall of the WordPress ecosystem. There's too many builders, there's too many options, and now we have Automattic coming in with their option and trying to force developers to do certain things, and that's actually causing friction within the ecosystem.
There's just so many options that people don't know what to do. Well, Ghost is more like WordPress was in the beginning, where you have a theme, and if you want to edit it, you download it and you write code. Of course, there's a lot of code out there that you can simply just copy and paste, so you don't need to be a developer. I don't know how to write code myself. I can do some HTML and some CSS, but beyond that I'm pretty much useless. So don't get me wrong here, it's definitely a usable platform for the average person, but it's nowhere near as developed and friendly as WordPress is.
Conclusion: Why I'm Moving to Ghost
So I am moving to Ghost. Now, I'm going to quickly modify that statement in that I am still very much a WordPress fanatic. In fact, I make most of my living managing websites for WordPress users, so in no way am I saying WordPress is bad and you need to abandon it. However, for the website for this channel, for Profitable Tools, that is moving. In fact, it's already moved over to Ghost. I'm using their managed hosting, and I chose that, by the way, for two simple reasons. One, I want to support the open source project, and I felt like this was a good direct way to do that. The second thing is that I really just wanted to keep this simple. I wanted to make the website something that wasn't something that needed to be maintained, and I didn't have to think a lot about. So that was an obvious choice, just have it managed for me, and I thought the price was right.
Final Thoughts & Call to Action
Now, the Profitable Tools website right now is not a lot to look at, I admit that, but I'm going to change it. I'm going to be customizing Ghost quite a bit over the next few weeks, and so I want to know, do you want to see more Ghost-related content? I'm going to do things like look at an integration with Webflow and using that as a visual builder for Ghost. I think that is really exciting for the non-coders out there. So let me know if Ghost content is exciting to you, if that's something you want to see more of. Definitely leave me a comment down below.
So if this video has sparked your interest towards Ghost, I do recommend going ahead and just giving it a whirl for yourself. It is free and open source. You can either install it locally and just give it a go, or they do have a free 14-day trial for their managed hosting. There's a link in the description if you want to click on that, it does support the channel and I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions about Ghost, make sure you leave me a comment down below. If anything about this video has been helpful, I'd hope you consider subscribing to the channel or sharing the video with a friend. And that's going to do it for this video. I'll see you in the next one.
