To be honest, it wasn’t Wordpress that was the issue. Having all my content spread across the web wasn’t really working very well anymore so I decided to take the plunge and migrate fxapi.co.uk to finnian.io/blog. To start with, I thought I’d just move the entire site to it’s new home on my server but I ended up changing my mind entirely and started using Ghost.

Why?

I love how hackable Ghost is - writing custom themes is such a breeze compared to Wordpress. I know PHP and have some experience with WP themes but Ghost’s Handlebars API is very very well designed and makes the whole process far easier.

Research

I did some poking around into how I should go about migrating a WP installation to Ghost so that I knew exactly what I was going to do, come that rainy day when I had enough time to do it. I found the excellent wp2ghost converter on Github and having tested the import functionality, it all seemed to work as expected. My major concern was how I was going to migrate the site ‘context’ as I call it. Essentially, all the links would break and how would I transfer the SEO to the new one - especially considering it was a new domain as well? Luckily, Alex Ellis had a suggestion: just leave it alone. What he said was I should just leave the old site running, but only put new posts on the new one. Over time, the new site would take precedence in terms of SEO and ’the place to go’ for my stuff. The old one would just fade away…

The technicalities

Almost all of the hassle of migrating from WP to Ghost was taken away by using wp2ghost which was really handy. Once I had the exported file ready for Ghost, everything else was taken care of by Ghost itself, which has a really good installation guide. I installed Google Analytics by whacking the tracking code in the footer via the Ghost UI and proceeded to check everything was working. All looked good!

Theme

I was a bit bored with seeing the default Casper theme all over the place and instantly being able to recognise those sites as Ghost, so I opted to write my own theme over a couple of weekends. As mentioned above, this was really easy and the source code is now available on Github if you like it.

To summarise, I’m very pleased I took the decision to move over to Ghost. This is mainly due to being able to run it on the same domain as my main site at finnian.io, but also because Ghost is just great ❤️