Why I’m Ghosting WordPress After 19 Years

I used WordPress for 19 years. (That was 2007!) Today I'm using Ghost. Let's talk about it!

There wasn’t one specific thing that fueled this decision, although the Kadence theme being rebranded to Liquid Web was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was absolutely not going to update 12 sites overnight!

It was time for a change. Nothing personal, it's just like the day I broke up with cPanel in 2015.

Highlights of an 18-Year Relationship

Before we talk about why I left, I want to give WordPress its credit. My time in the ecosystem was incredible, and I will always cherish it.

• The Community & Meetups: I was a co-organizer of the WordPress Pittsburgh Meetup for many years and this is where I made some of my absolute best friends. To quote the song WordPress Strong by Jonathan Mann: “Friends you can count on...Friends that go beyond.”
  
• WordCamps: I always loved the "hallway track" the best—the spontaneous, brilliant conversations between sessions.
  
• Global Collaboration: Working with incredibly talented people all over the world.
  
• The Skillset: WordPress is the reason I learned to code PHP, CSS, JS, and HTML. That's pretty awesome!

What Went Wrong: The Death by a Thousand Kvetches

It wasn’t one specific thing, but a combination of things I just simply don't have the energy to deal with anymore.

• No More Kvetch!
  I used to have so much to kvetch about, and honestly, many of those kvetches actually led to impactful core improvements over the years. But I realized I no longer wanted to spend my energy fighting the platform.
  
• The Tech Stack Tax
  At its core, WordPress is free. But if you want a fully functional, professional site, you end up adding 12 different plugins that cost $200 a year each. Suddenly, you’re looking at $2,400 per site, per year. For a lean, independent publisher managing multiple properties like myself, that is simply not sustainable.
  
• The Enterprise Hosting Trap
  I used to get by on simple, affordable hosting. But as WordPress grew more robust—and as my traffic scaled—the resource demands skyrocketed. I absolutely loved my Nginx Google Cloud setup over at Kinsta, but it was running me close to $600 a month! That's insane.
  
• Code Bloat & DOM Sizes
  The Gutenberg block editor code brought an administrative nightmare of unnecessary bloat. I found my pages regularly failing Google's DOM size recommendations on posts longer than just 800 words with more than two photos.

I will always love WordPress, and I won't rule out using it again in the future. But for now? I’m ghosting it. Literally.

Switching to the Ghost Platform

I’ve been aware of Ghost for a long time. It was originally launched back in 2013, but back then, it wasn’t quite what I needed. Fast forward to today, and it’s everything I need.

Here is what hooked me:

• Built-in Memberships & Newsletters: Anyone who has ever attempted to build a membership site on WordPress knows the unique psychological torment it inflicts. (Paid Memberships Pro is the only sane way to go if you're crazy enough to try it.) But after years sunk into development, I couldn't justify it anymore. Ghost has memberships and newsletters baked right in.
  
• The One-Click Newsletter Solution: I’ll admit it—I am that person who built an email list of 5,000 people and then never sent a single email. It always felt so redundant to write a blog post, and then turn around and write a separate email about the blog post. With Ghost, you just email the post. It’s that simple.
  
• New Code & Open Source Opportunities: The absolute best parts of WordPress are still alive and well in Ghost. I still get to dive into open-source development, contribute code, write tutorials, and be part of a vibrant community. I am totally on board.

The Next Chapter

'It’s exciting to feel this energized about publishing again. I can’t wait to dive even deeper into Ghost's developer documentation, because I'm sure there's cool features I haven't even discovered yet. I may even develop some themes or add-ons in the future.

Want to try it out as a user?

Sign up for the free newsletter I send out every Friday. There's no risk and you can get a first-hand look at what your audience might experience. Plus cat photos!

And of course, if you'd like to test run the paid version experience, please join for $5 and you can literally ask me anything about the transition, what it's like to run hundreds of WordPress sites and make this switch, and all the other things I ran into during my transition to Ghost!