Why I moved my Wordpress blog to Ghost

by David Burgos

Finally I moved my Wordpress blog to Ghost. Here is the list of reasons and also the new changes I added.

Reasons

1 - Performance

On Wordpress I was using a couple of plugins just for performance: WP Super Cache and Wordpress Super Minify and still the site was a bit slow.

I didn't know what to do more to speed up the site. I even tried with some Apache configs and it improved a bit... but God, if I use this popular software I expect to not to do this kind of work.

And the blog was under 20K views per month, so...

2 - Editor

When I was writing posts with code examples, I must switched to code editor. In order to add images or links, I switched to WYSIWYG editor.

But if I returned to open a post with code example, it opens in WYSIWYG editor and the & and other html code breaks. A bit annoying detail. And one more thing: sometimes I was writing the <codes> or <pre> blocks as on markdown, with `` `, probably for my daily use of Github.

And I know there is at least 1 plugin for add Markdown support to Wordpress, but I don't like to have to add a plugin for every single thing. It sucks, don't you think?

3 - Configuration

Recently I moved my Wordpress blog from GoDaddy to a VPS on Vultr and I spent time resolving idiot errors with Apache.

On the other hand, I have more experience and feel better using Nginx.

4 - Simplicity

When I tried Ghost I felt in love with it for the simplicity of installation and use. It's fucking focused on just blogging. And that's what I want, a blog, not a multi-purpose CMS. And the user experience is clearly better.

However, I miss some features but none critical.

New changes

  • New domain. I purchased a new cool, shorter domain davidburgos.blog anyway the previous domain davidburgosonline.com is alive and all the old URLs should be working.
  • Secure. The blog is now under a 256 bits SSL. I hope it counts for SEO :)
  • Faster. Besides to the Ghost performance, I started to use Cloudinary in order to hand images and minified CSS to one single file.
  • Nicer? I think yes. I had to change the theme so I forked the Odin theme.
  • More content. I want to post content more often and I'll try to write them in English.