Ghost vs WordPress: Which Blogging Platform Rules for Writers?

There’s almost no decision more important for a fledgling blogger than choosing the right blogging platform.

Choosing which blogging platform to use is an agonising decision — because switching costs are high once you’re in too deep

Some people say WordPress, others say SquareSpace, yet others say something out of the ordinary like a headless CMS.

What should you do?

Note: I used to have this blog hosted on Ghost. As of late 2023, I’ve moved it to WordPress. I discuss this at the end.

Summary of Ghost vs WordPress — An Overview

I’m here to tell you for many of you, you should at least try Ghost.

(Note: I get a small commission if you sign up. But I was recommending Ghost for years before they offered this.)

Even though WordPress makes it easier to design an overall attractive website, the whole point of blogging is content creation — writing — and it’s so much easier to write with Ghost.

I will consider Ghost vs WordPress from every angle that’s important to writers. Here are the things important to most bloggers:

• Easy to design a website: Creating a nice looking website with templates that they get off the shelf and customise/modify slightly
• Easy content creation: Write articles and create pages
• Extensibility: Extend the website with plug-ins for useful features
• Speed: Have a really fast website
• Ease of maintenance: Not have to maintain servers or code
• Ease of contact with customers: Not requiring a separate newsletter service

But as a preface, I really like Ghost’s mission and ethos.

Ghost was created initially by John Nolan as a simple answer to WordPress’ complexity. He said WordPress was many things to many people, but had gone far beyond its initial mission as a blog platform for content creators.

Nolan said, essentially, “Let’s see if we can create something pure and great within the framework of a not-for-profit company.”

It says it all in their initial mission statement in detail.

We started working on Ghost because we wanted to build a great open source publishing platform which would empower independent creators, but we also started this company as a social experiment.

We wanted to know: What would it look like if you built a technology startup which could not make anyone rich.

If you eliminated all the promises of wealth from the roadmap up front, and tried to build a good company, how would that affect the product, business, customers, and every little decision in between?

They’re so transparent, in fact, they even publish their revenue — verified by Stripe.

Onward to the analysis!

Ghost vs WordPress for ease of designing attractive websites: Tied, but WordPress Has More Themes

Both Ghost and WordPress have amazing looking templates and can be the backbone of incredible websites, from simple travel blogs to full-featured company pages.

But WordPress wins this round for a few reasons.

Mostly, WordPress has a large array of themes created by developers eager to sell products and serve an audience.

Ghost has themes, but there are fewer, and they’re not as capable, nor as easy to modify.

WordPress has been going further and further towards being a complete site builder. But Ghost has moved towards being a blog and newsletter service.

Modifying WordPress themes rarely involves code — you usually use the customiser. You can change the layout of the front page, the archives pages, and the post and pages very easily, choosing where your header image goes, how big a sidebar there is, and so on.

But to modify a Ghost theme, you need to learn to write in handlebars script. Even things like changing the font size on the main page means delving into script.

Basically, Ghost is fine if you’re OK with themes as you get them, or are OK with coding.

Ghost vs WordPress for Content Creation: Ghost 5/5, WordPress 4/5

When it comes to writing articles and pages, it’s still easier in Ghost.

The Koenig editor, now a standard part of Ghost, is pure joy to use. You type, and what you display is basically what is published — just like typing in Medium, or Substack, for example.

Ghost has such a nice interface that is such a pleasure to use that I sometimes used to draft articles in Ghost and then copy-paste them into WordPress, especially during WordPress’ dark period around version 5.0 or 5.1, when its Gutenberg editor was garbage.

These days, WordPress’ Gutenberg editor has come a long way since WordPress 5.0 / 5.1. It used to be laggy and unresponsive, but this is no longer the case, and it’s also easy to write with.

However, there’s a double-edged sword WordPress’ flexibility. On the one hand, I can do so much stuff in WordPress easily — add tables, create column layouts, or add in widgets.

On the other hand, Ghost’s simplicity means that it’s easy to just put words down. That’s what makes it so appealing.

For me, Ghost’s simplicity and distraction-free interface wins me over. But WordPress is also great.

Ghost vs. WordPress for Extensibility: WordPress 5/5, Ghost 3/5

WordPress has so many plug-ins, it’s ridiculous. I’ve been shocked at how much choice I have for plug-ins for things like

• Automatic backups
• Reformatting the comments system
• Debugging code conflicts
• Injecting header code
• Filtering comment spam
• Analytics dashboards

And so much more. So many things. None of the above are available for Ghost.

Ghost does have extensibility via its API and emerging plug-ins platform, but it has always been sparse.

The main reason Ghost doesn’t get 1/5 is that many of the reasons for which you extend WordPress are the reasons you would choose Ghost in the first place. Firstly, many Ghost users simply choose to eschew the complex beast that WordPress has become. Secondly, many things come out of the box with Ghost, like

• A nice editing interface (as mentioned above)
• AMP support
• Image compression and optimised delivery
• Image library (doesn’t even show it to you; takes care of that behind the scenes)
• Fast platform that requires no optimisation

Still, it has a long way to go.

For example, Ghost users are very limited in choice of comments — the most common free option is Discus, which is widely disliked for being slow and intrusive on privacy, and then other options either requiring more hosting configuration or costing money.

Or take analytics. With Ghost, you can integrate third-party analytics dashboards like Google Analytics of course. But there’s no built-in dashboard.

Some websites are trying to launch their own analytics platforms, but they cost money, and I didn’t bite (e.g. Ghostboard).

Ghost vs. WordPress for Speed: Ghost 5/5, WordPress 3/5

Ghost is fast. For many reasons.

Firstly, Ghost runs on NodeJS, which is faster than PHP on which WordPress runs.

Secondly, Ghost is more lightweight, not bogged down in plug-ins and legacy compatibility.

Finally, Ghost has a lot of intelligent stuff built in to speed it up, like resizing images on the fly.

I run two concurrent Ghost instances on the smallest possible DigitalOcean droplet without it batting an eye. That’s $2.50 a month of server hosting! I could host more on the same droplet, too. (See how to install more Ghost instances on one server.)

WordPress… it CAN be fast, but to get it fast you have to do clever things like

• Use a CDN
• Install plug-ins like caches and optimisers, to minify JS, pre-load fonts and so on
• Install plug-ins to optimize images and serve them in a different format
• Have a fast hosting service
• Have a nicely optimized theme

That’s a lot of dependencies for a fast website. And things tend to change between generations of WordPress, or with new plugins. Attaining a fast site is a constant work in progress.

All my Ghost-hosted websites get a rating of Excellent on Google’s page speed test and Pingdom. Again, this is on the cheapest server on DigitalOcean – out of the box.

You can, of course, pay $9 a month from Ghost.org for their hosted service, and probably get even faster response. Try it!

Ghost vs. WordPress for Ease of Maintenance: WordPress… if you pay

When I originally wrote this article, there were very few ways of hosting Ghost: Either self-hosting, or hosting on Ghost.org.

These days, there are a plethora of options for Ghost. One common one is to host it via a managed hosting platform, like Cloudways.

But WordPress is still easier to host.

With WordPress, there are shared hosts and VPS options galore. I use a few, including WPX and Bigscoots, and get very fast response times, almost instant customer service responses, and no downtime. They do everything for me.

I really like WPX — for $25 a month, I can host 5 sites. It’s blazing fast.

So if you pay for managed hosting with WordPress, hosting is much easier. But you have to be willing to pay.

Wrap up

I like Ghost for its simplicity, speed, and budget friendliness. Plus, it’s a joy to write with. If you want an attractive, fast, easy-to-use blog out of the box that comes with an email system, then you want Ghost.

But there’s no question that WordPress is easier to extend and customise. If you know exactly what you want, are willing to pay more for hosting and email, and don’t mind managing plugins, then WordPress is probably the way to go.

I used Ghost for years. Eventually, I realised that there are synergies to be had in having all my websites on a couple of VPS, and all of them using the same technology stack. So I moved this blog to WordPress — the last one.

I still miss it. And I think more people should try Ghost. So sign up for Ghost.org’s hosting and you get a two-week free trial. I wouldn’t recommend it if I weren’t sure you’d love it!