Blogging, someone who makes a news website? Tired of using WordPress? Is the website very slow?
If you are a blogger or a person who runs a news website, a big problem for you who use WordPress is that the speed of the website is not enough. The biggest reason for this is that WordPress is not a CMS designed only for blogging. WordPress is a versatile CMS. So the best solution for that is to use a CMS designed only for blogging.
Today I am going to talk about a CMS platform that was created only for blogging. that’s it Ghost. Although not very famous in Sri Lanka, Ghost is a CMS platform that is widely used all over the world. For example, Buffer, OpenAI, Mozilla, Ulessys have used Ghost CMS to create their blogs.
When using the Ghost CMS, you get the opportunity to use a lot of features that are only reserved for blogging. But when using WordPress, apart from blogging, you get other features that you don’t need even during the installation of WordPress itself. In this way, Ghost CMS has become a highly efficient CMS due to the addition of only essential features.
What is this Ghost?
Ghost CMS is a software platform created without the objective of profit. This CMS Platform, which will be released to the world for the first time in 2013, is starting to be created with an initial support of 190,000 US dollars. This project started by John O’Nolan has managed to surpass 2.5 million installations worldwide. The best part of this is that as of the year 2021, there are only nearly 7,000 websites powered by Ghost CMS worldwide.
It is still being developed day by day by a large group of software developers from all over the world with the Ghost CMS, which works faster than WordPress from the beginning. The Ghost CMS is completely created using Node.js and the script language called PHP is used to create WordPress.
Why should you use Ghost instead of WordPress?
As mentioned earlier, Ghost is a software platform with a lot of flexible features. Let’s take those features one by one and analyze them.
Interesting text editor
The rich text editor that Ghost CMS has is a very flexible text editor and through it we have got the ability to experience image galleries, embed cards, Markdown, HTML and many other great features.
Ability to monetize users
One of the most important features here is that you who create a website using Ghost CMS have been given the facility called Premium membership, which gives you the ability to earn money through it very easily. You can recruit users for free, and those users have the option to convert their profile to a premium membership if desired. There is also the possibility of posting articles in a way that only users who have paid through it can access. In addition, you can send newsletters to registered users for free.
Support for all Ad networks
This is a very valuable and advanced feature. Ghost CMS supports all ad networks in the world. These include Google Adsense, Facebook Audience Network (Instant Articles), Taboola and many other ad networks. And these ad networks are very easily supported.
Paid memberships
In order to get facilities like member registrations, member management, payments, subscriptions and email newsletter through WordPress, separate plugins have to be installed and thus installing plugins causes the WordPress website to slow down. Also, you have to pay a certain amount of money every month to use those plugins legally. But if you use Ghost CMS, you will not face such problems, because you can get all those facilities and features for free through Ghost CMS.
Inbuilt SEO
The biggest headache for anyone running a website is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. In WordPress, if we want to do SEO properly, we have to pay and buy plugins. But its creators have worked to include all the facilities required to do all the things done through those plugins without installing any plugin in Ghost. For that reason, it is possible to carry out SEO activities without paying any extra money. Through that, the ability to cut costs for plugins such as YoastSEO comes because all the things that can be done through it are provided for free through Ghost.
The following SEO facilities are available through Ghost.
- Automatic creation of Google Sitemap
- Ability to include custom page metadata
- Ability to insert canonical tags
- Ability to include Tidy markup and attributes
- Clean permalink and custom URL structures facility
- Google AMP pages
- Optimized URLs
- Microformats
- Facebook Open Graph tags
- Support for Twitter cards
- Clean semantic markup
None of this requires installing any additional plugins.
Ability to easily install Themes
Generally, WordPress users are well aware of the fact that after purchasing a WordPress theme, they have to do annoying things such as setup, theme import etc. But Ghost mind is not going to do such annoying things. There you have to use a pre-made theme. The main advantage of this is that if you have knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can use that knowledge to create your own theme.
Fastness
Ghost is really fast. The best example of that is the Android Worker website. It is because it is created using Node.js which is a Modern Technology Stack. Ghost is guaranteed to be 1,900% faster compared to WordPress. In the time that WordPress takes to respond to one request, Ghost manages to respond to 19 requests. This speed is very important in ranking your website in search engines because it supports core web vitals.
Support for a wide range of technology services available worldwide
Ghost supports a wide range of services in the world. All of that is available to you in Ghost’s backend integrations tab There is the ability to look through one.
Then Ghost does not have disadvantages?
So in this Ghost vs WordPress comparative analysis I did, only the most important factors are why Ghost is ahead of WordPress. Let’s talk about the weaknesses of Ghost.
Ghost requires a minimum of 1 Core processor and 1GB of RAM to run. Also, a Node version recommended by them, which requires Ghost to run, must be installed on the server. Most shared hosting providers do not install Node on their servers, so you will not be able to install Ghost through it. So you have to go for a VPS. Although it is known as a weakness, we see it as a very good approach when considering the speed of the website.
Since there are no plugins like in WordPress, Ghost can be somewhat difficult for a beginner to use. But as mentioned earlier, other services can be used with Ghost. Through that, it has been possible to maintain the website in the usual rhythm without slowing down.
There are many tutorials on the internet for WordPress, but there are not many such tutorials for Ghost. But, Ghost has an active community. We find answers to some questions from that community.
Android workers support us in using Ghost
Android workers decided to run the website with Ghost and after taking that step, we Android workers also had to face a lot of problems. But we were able to solve them easily one by one. For that, Ghost’s forum helped a lot and Kasun Jayaratne of TechNews.LK and Rezor Kenway of Android staff who were always with us provided a helping hand.
So, if there is anyone who wants to use Ghost, we Android workers have decided to support them from setting up Ghost instant to doing all the work. For that we have decided the basic charges and you can know the prices by contacting us. The services we provide are as follows.
- Install and Setup Ghost – Starting at $30
- Customize Ghost Theme – Starting at $50 (will depend on the requirement)
- Develop Ghost Theme from scratch – Starting at $200
- Fix any Ghost errors – Starting at $20
- Ghost website consultation – Starting at $5/hr
- Migrate to Ghost – Starting at $10 (Please note that the price of Ghost Installation is not included here.)
- On-page SEO Experts (with Shen Tharindu Senanayake) – Price will be decided by Tharindu
- Update Ghost to the latest version (if you took our service to setup Ghost, free for 01 year) – Starting at $10
- Review/Audit Ghost Website – Starting at $35
- Teach Ghost theme development – Starting at $100
We currently support the following servers for Ghost setup.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- DigitalOcean (DO)
- Linode
- Vultr
- UpCloud
- Microsoft Azure (upcoming)
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) (upcoming)
Currently, both the Android workers and TechNews.LK websites that provide Tech News are running using Ghost. Also, Android workers worked to create a YouTuber’s blog on Ghost, which is loved by those who love science and technology in Sri Lanka. Here is the testimonial he gave us. (There is no way to mention the name right now, because the project does not target Sri Lanka)
“The Internet is a messy & busy place and we have to make everything perfect on our website before we request a few seconds of attention from our audience. Thimira at “Android Worker Digital” clearly understands that fact and is paranoid about perfection. They pay extreme attention to color science, typography, reading experience, performance, and everything in between.
Usually, when I’m designing and developing websites, I ask the designer and developer what to do and sometimes how to do it. With Android workers Digital, I never had to do that. They did everything way beyond my expectations. In other words, they took care of my baby even better than I do.”
So, if you are someone who only focuses on blogging, if you are tired of WordPress, call us today, start your journey with Ghost, or migrate your existing website to Ghost.
If you need more details, you can contact us. WhatsApp on 0766965221.
NB Ghost.org offers the opportunity to run Ghost blog sites on their own hosting service and their software platform is open source and anyone can use it without any hindrance.