My new favorite website platform

For the last while, I’ve been running my websites and newsletters on Beehiiv. It's a solid platform for getting off the ground, but recently, I wanted a change. I wanted more control over my design, better typography, and most importantly, a faster website.

So I decided to migrate a few of my projects over to Ghost (ghost.org). After spending the last 2-3 months in the trenches setting it up, I can confidently say it’s my new favorite platform.

Enter Ghost

Ghost feels like it was built specifically for people like me. It’s an open-source, Node.js-based publishing platform. While platforms like Beehiiv and Substack are amazing for rapid iteration, Ghost gives you the keys to the entire car.

Migrating

Migrating an active website and newsletter can be nerve-wracking, but it went smoother than I expected it to. Ghost actually have their own built-in tools for migrating using a CSV file, but I ran into some problems trying to get it to work. After having trouble running the tool on my Windows machine, I switched over to my Linux machine and ran the tool with no problem. The tool converted the exported CSV file from Beehiiv to a .json which I just imported into the Ghost database.

Now with that much data, of course I expected something to go wrong. Apart from a few photos missing, and a few publishing dates being wrong, everything went smooth.

Creating the new website

Creating the site was pretty straight-forward. I went through a few themes that Ghost offers and purchased the one I like. I imported the theme, customized everything to my liking, set up headers, navigations, tags and some coding to fix some errors. Of course there's a lot more to it, and a lot of time that went into it, but in summary this is how it went.

The verdict

The result? A blazingly fast website that looks exactly how I envisioned it. The SEO structure is fantastic out of the box, and the writing experience in their editor is incredibly clean and distraction-free.

It definitely took a bit more technical troubleshooting to get everything perfect compared to a fully hosted AIO solution, but having complete control over my platform’s architecture and design is exactly what I was looking for.

Are any of you building on Ghost right now? Would love to hear what the rest of the community is using for their tech stack!