My experience moving from Wordpress to Ghost Pro Hosted- what to know (March 2026)

**This was written in 2026 but I made the date older because I didn't want it display on my front page and they have no way of excluding posts - also an issue!

In 2024 and 2025 my already small blogging income fell off a cliff from AI stealing my work like all other bloggers. I would spend days writing a post only to see it summarised by google at the top of a search a day later, negating the need for anyone to ever click through and read my work. I fell out of love with my blog and started searching for a way to protect my content from being stolen.

The TLDR is in the end I chose Ghost because:

• It was lightening fast (especially compared to some more feature rich newsletter alternatives)
• had a hard membership wall to stop my content been stolen when I chose to use it.
• No more image editing as it loads all the various size image versions in the background you can just upload the full size file!
• I had a lot of concerns because of all the missing features that still bug but in the end betoota changed them and I figured if they can make it work so I can ha.

The Good

Really you can see this on their website about what features, for me the lightening fast loading, relatively simple interface and built in paywall was a winner that won out over what was missing in the end. There is also no arbitrary tiny limit on storage for images etc that are essential to your website which is great.

But Some stuff is very very different to Wordpress. As its taken me months of work to change all my customer wordpress blocks to fit the ghost ecosystem and won't be going back here is all the this is all the stuff that has annoyed me so you can decide if this is a dealbreaker for you.

What I dislike

No Hierarchy/sub tags/sub pages

This was the main thing that was nearly a deal breaker for me. I previously had my content as sub pages and then moved to a sub categories system prior to moving to ghost. Not being able to group content at a more nuanced level that makes sense for a user to navigate is incredibly frustrating.

As a travel blog I had many levels of destinations and interests nested below their parent category, using the custom category template, so people could back navigate and find other things in the area they were visiting. Everything was neatly nested a sub category. For example a page on bright had customer destination guide with the posts all underneath or even under headings on this page but this was nested under a page on the high country region with the same and that under Victoria with the same.

With the current ghost set up you cant really create Hub Pages for destinations unless you want the same problem as old wordpress before they had category templates where you end up with two seperate navigation systems - one for pages and one for posts/categories. While there is the bookmark function which displays one post at a time there is also no option to set this to display multiple posts from a tag (as ghost has just tags) so there is no easy way to display an equivalent to Wordpress post loop.

Navigation

Unless you buy a custom theme the navigation menus are only 1 layer deep. This is super annoying for a blog such as Travel where you might want to group say destinations under one menu, travel types under another etc. Instead the only way to have them in the menu is to have them in the top level. This is a double blow given there is no sub tag structure.

No way to edit categories

Really this is a triple whammy as you cant even customise the hub pages for your blog pasts. I liked to display destination information on my category archive on wordpress (which is a tag on ghost) which I could do on wordpress using templates. TBH I also hated their system, can't understand why a category/tag cant be built like a post where you just add blocks or cards as needed but at least it could be done with templates.

Pricing

I hate when pricing excludes features that could help grow or monetise in its lower tiers. To me it seems like the smarter option is to make payment tiers by number of users or members. Being able to have as many newsletters as you want helps you provide a better customer experience and is more likely to help you grow faster and being able to monetise from early days is more likely to help you build sustainable income quicker. Personally it sucks paying quite a lot more for a website that currently has no paying members just so I can have a few newsletters to seperate out topics into niches. I would rather have all the features and pay as my quantity of members or visitors or whatever increases. Or have the option to pay a percentage of membership fees in lower tiers so it's affordable when income is low.

Members only signup box

There is no easy way to customise this....surely given this is there main selling feature it should be a simple edit to change the text in this box

Card for Signups

This confusingly doesn't trigger someone to join as a member just a subscriber. But it doesn't prompt them to choose a newsletter. So its kinda obsolete if you have multiple newsletters with the auto add function turned off (because this is the only way to prompt a user to select which newsletter they want while singing up as a member) because you have no-idea what topics they are interested in... I would prefer to have a card that encourages signing up as a free member not a sort of newsletter subscriber.

Newsletter Sign Ups

There is no box ticking option for visitors to choose their newsletter unless you turn off auto add new members and then this forces them to choose. This is also the only way to preview what sign ups look like for members.

401/Redirects

If your coming from rank maths redirection tool you're in for a rude shock with Ghost as there is essentially no way to redirect without coding into some document and uploading it which is beyond my capacity but also incredibly laborious. This sucks when you have to change from a website with a Hierarchy to flat tags and a different permalink structure as it creates a tonne of 401 errors and wasted traffic with no easy way to fix it :( This is especially an issue if you have evergreen traffic from places like Pinterest that are directing to old links that are now dead because you can't redirect it easily.

Homepage Editying

There is very little options to customise the homepage, you cant add your own banners/heros etc Really the only way is to pay for a premium theme that has different home page options. There is also no way to exclude tags or specific posts from displaying on your front of your website.

Images

Images won't import from Galleries, custom blocks etc which makes it a time consuming process changing as I am still manually going into posts and trying to update broken images