Oct 10, 2024 2 min read wordpress

Migrating away from WordPress

Some of you may be aware of Matt Mullenweg having an absolute breakdown with WordPress Engine. Basically, WPE offer various WordPress hosting packages, and they have become the number one host for WordPress. It looks like they have never contributed to the core WordPress or given money to them to help with developement.

Matt has made some strange moves, including a tickbox that confirms you're not affiliated with WPE in any way. To me, this was the last straw and it affects every user on the platform.

Why Ghost?

Ghost is an amazing platform and focuses on blogging and newsletters. The perfect duo! They also make it easy to add other integrations, and the themes look lovely. One thing I'm looking forward to is having ActivityPub built-in, which means my blog will be part of the fediverse once again.

Ghost's support is also superb. I had some issues migrating over, and they helped while at a Ghost retreat! Their team gets treated with so much respect, too!

Ghost also supports Markdown, and their editor is a lot nicer than WordPress' Gutenberg editor.

How did you migrate away?

I used Ghost's WordPress plugin to export a json file, which contained all of my posts. The file wasn't formatted correctly, as it was missing the "html": "", to every post within the json file. I then used this article, which uses a Python script and the Ghost API to migrate all posts. The post date is incorrect on all my posts, but I will slowly tidy this up.

As for the images, there was a lot to get through! I had to FTP to my WordPress host, download and zip all my images and then upload them. You can follow this article from Ghost themselves to get through it.

Not the smoothest migration

It isn't the smoothest migration, but what is? Some people suggested Statamic instead, but that's more of a CMS than a blogging platform, and didn't really suit my needs. Also, I feel like the migration to Statamic would have been more bumpy.