From WordPress to Ghost in the JAMstack

TL;DR version:
If you're tech-savvy, just grab this code and you'll figure it out immediately.

The rest of you, just grab this free online tutorial where I explain the whole process step by step: https://skl.sh/2YgFBub

Longer version:
I know that you don't have time for meaningless small-talk so let's get to it. In this straight-to-the-point article, I will show you how to save hundreds of dollars per year by transferring your slow and expensive WordPress-based website to a fast, secure and free static Ghost-based blog.

Instead of paying your hard-earned money for expensive web hosting and some more for premium plugins only to get mediocre performance at best, you'll pay nothing and get the best solution the current technology offers.

I recently switched one of my WordPress website to this modern solution and this is what happened. This is your SEO holy grail and the ticket to the top of Google results because speed is everything and you can't possibly get any better results.

This is also something I was never able to achieve with WordPress, no matter how many hacks I tried, what SEO plugins I bought, how much I optimized images, Javascript and CSS.

Yes, there are some managed hosting services that will take your WordPress to a hundred percent in a speed test, but you will pay a small fortune for it while my solution is a hundred percent free of charge. You won't pay for web hosting, you won't pay for any special plugins, you'll get everything for free including the state of the art cloud-based image storage for your posts.

With my solution, you'll get the best of both worlds money can buy and yet you won't spend a single penny:

1. A distraction-free state of the art CMS writers simply love for its ease of use
2. Static, fast and secure blog hosted on Netlify's blazingly fast CDN network

This means that you can finally ditch your slow and expensive WordPress blog that drives you crazy.

To achieve this future-proof professional publishing state, we will turn a regular Ghost CMS into a static blog and serve it from CDN.

Basically, we'll take the best distraction-free editor out there, which is the Koenig editor from Ghost CMS, and teach it how to upload post images directly to Cloudinary.com, your free CDN image repository.

You'll be able to create all your content locally on your machine and once it's ready, we'll transform it with Gatsby to a blazingly fast static website that we'll deploy to the state-of-the-art CDN network provided by Netlify. And yes, your content will be delivered via a secured HTTPS connection, because we want Google to love your site as much as your readers.

This is the basic overview of your future blogging experience:

1. You will write your blog posts in your local Ghost CMS running in Docker container to keep your main operating system clean and fast.
2. All the images will be automatically uploaded to Cloudinary CDN for the fast delivery and all sorts of other amazing features.
3. Once you'll publish your new post, you're ready to take it from your local Ghost to the Internet.
4. First, you will expose your localhost to the Internet.
5. Next, you will deploy your blog to Netlify which means that Gatsby static generator sitting in your GitHub account will crunch the code and spit out the static version of your Ghost blog to Netlify's CDN.

I get it, at first, this might be quite intimidating, especially for total beginners who have no idea what's Gatsby or Docker.

That's why I wanted to make the whole process extremely easy (even for total beginners), so I have decided to create a special docker-compose recipe and give you the whole setup package, so you'll be up and running in no time.

Instead of explaining it all in a text form, I created a simple video tutorial which I published on Skillshare where you can get it for free via this link: https://skl.sh/2YgFBub

I hope you'll enjoy this tutorial, ditch your expensive and slow WordPress and make your website a better experience not only for your readers but for Google as well, because speed is everything!

I really want to help you, so if you get stuck, especially on Windows, let me know so I can guide you. I'm sure it's well worth the effort so you'll never ever have to decide which plan is just enough but not too bad...

Comments

[Kat Medinah (codename)]

Hi Jan, great post. Have you turned ON Ghost's Members feature in your deployment?
Would it work?

I'm looking for a tutorial on how to get Ghost with Members feature ON hosted on Netlify.

[Jan Zavrel]

Thanks, Kat. I didn't, actually, I'm moving away from Ghost to Notion and Jekyll-based static website because Notion plays nicely with Grammarly and I like how it exports my articles in MD format so I can easily publish them on my websites, Medium, Dev and Hashnode at the same time with minor tweaks and changes.