What's a good Wordpress alternative for a blog?
I built my blog using Wordpress and I'm trying to find a good alternative because I don't need all that infrastructure just to write and publish content every friday. I also have static pages, but I'm not using comments or other stuff from Wordpress.
I've been reading about Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll... and I'm not sure which one is better.
My goals:
- Improve performance
- Being able to design and develop a custom theme
- Write using markdown or similar
I'd like to know about your experience trying those (or other) options so I can choose properly.
Thank you!
Ghost CMS is your ideal product. You can create your own templates just using HTML and CSS (they have very detailed documentation on their how-to page). It's perfect for freelance writers, plus you can create your own newsletter.
You can even make money with your blog by creating subscriptions. Their control panel is quite intuitive, easy to use and very clean. It is not as cumbersome and confusing as WordPress.
It is also open source, and has several options to host your blog with ghost. You can do it from their official website, Digital Ocean, Linode or even Namecheap, they have a very juicy plan that for 10$/month, you get 100k visits per month. 😁
Thank you for your answer, AinzMura! I currently use Mailchimp for my newsletter, but it's very expensive for what they offer. I didn't know you can create a newsletter using Ghost CMS!
No problem, it is my pleasure to help you 😁
Really? Well, with Ghost that will be a problem of the past, everything is integrated into the same dashboard of the cms, so you will not have to use an external and complex service for that.
I hope your business is easier to carry with it. Good luck!
Sending an Email by itself, without a blog post attached to it, is relatively new.
I think you still need a mailgun (or similar) account to actually send emails.
I use Webflow for some my blogging project and landing pages.
It makes it easy to get a new landing page up and simplifies the management of marketing pages. It enables tech-savvy individuals to get into the code and make custom changes easily.
The number of high-quality templates available is also a big plus point and made it very easy to finally update our websites.
Thanks appmetrix! I've checked Webflow and I have some concerns about SEO, performance and also about the learning curve. Are you using it? What are your thoughts?
I currently use wordpress for katlinks.io, but superblog.ai is a great alternative. I plan to use it for an upcoming project.
Thank you @RobertoDigital :)
Hey @cbusquets, I'm building superblog as an alternative to WordPress with UI/UX of Medium. Zero optimization and maintenance required. Please take a look, happy to answer any questions you might have. superblog.ai
I am a big fan of Strapi, which is a headless CMS specifically conceived for developers. It's extremely simple to deploy and free to use.
Thank you Mazenode! I didn't knew about Strapi. I checked their website and it looks very promising.
we just migrated our blog (blog.typogram.co) to hashnode
it's free to set up a custom domain and you can set up email subscriptions too!
Thank you huashu! Which other features made you migrate to hashnode?
I've tried Hugo and Jekyll, and landed on 11ty https://www.11ty.dev/ as a static site generator. It's very simple to design your own theme and you can write your posts in markdown.
Thank you nuvic! I didn't know about 11ty. I'm curious: why did you switch there from Hugo / Jekyll?
It's written in Javascript, so all the configs and customizations you want to do are also in Javascript. It just makes sense if you're more familiar with JS.
also: https://www.beehiiv.com/
If you'd like to test them all and write about it or talk about your choice, would love to chat
If you want alternative for blogging purposes then Ghost is the boss
All in one solution
You can get idea how I built my newsletter https://thesaleheen.com/tech-stack-of-my-newsletter/
Thank you saleheen. I'll take a look at your post :)
Read this https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog/
Thanks for the link, fromtheexchange. It's extremely detailed!
I am also a big fan of Ghost.
I am using their 9$/month plan for my blog and I am really happy.
Super fast and very easy to use.
I also tried Webflow, but the writing experience in Ghost was much better and made the difference for me.
Haven't tried to customise their themes yet, but planning to try it out pretty soon.
Thank you for your reply, nirshub. I also checked Webflow but I'm not very convinced, specially in terms of SEO and performance. Let me know how the theme costumization goes :)
Ghost CMS is amazing and might suit you well.
You can even use it as a headless CMS.
Improve performance
-- there is no need to improve Ghost's performance
Being able to design and develop a custom theme
-- you can use a custom theme with Ghost. But, not every managed host allows this on their cheapest plans.
Write using markdown or similar
-- Ghost editor is amazing. I love it.
Or self-host for free on Github pages. Also, DigitalOcean is the most popular self-hosting option ($5/ month).
However, I am an advocate that using managed hosting is infinitely better. Let me tell you why:
Yet, self-host if:
Also, if you self-host you need to pay for Mailgun emails yourself. That's $0,8 for every 1k emails sent on a pay-as-you-go plan.
I've some articles about this on my blog and a review on my YT channel.
You can read about it here: https://www.thestackjunction.com/ghost-cms-review/
Thank you for your detalied reply, tiagosilva! I'm currently using DigitalOcean, I switched there a year ago to improve some performance problems related to my old hosting. By now I'll take a look on Ghost as headless CMS, it looks promising from what I've read today (I'll check your YT channel as well).
I didn't know about Mailgun, it could be a good alternative to my current provider.
I think that it is worth giving Ghost a try. For me, that's the go-to self-hosted blogging platform of choice in case that you wanted to create your own templates.
For my personal blog I use the DevDojo DevBlog feature (https://devdojo.com/devblog), it has great speed, awesome Markdown editor but you can't design your own themes.
Here is an example of my blog:
https://blog.bobby.sh