So for over a decade i've had a love-hate relationship with CMS platforms when it comes to both blogging and websites.

No matter the CMS platform a common theme and cycle emerged:

  1. Plugins.
  2. Lack of updates for Plugins feeding into security issues.
  3. Spending more time updating the CMS and plugins than writing and updating content.

In my personal opinion - Wordpress was the least broken CMS, after the trials and tribulations associated with years of web content management. The bloat however has never reduced, its still sluggish and unwieldy depending on the plugins loading in the background.

All of the above excludes the normal sysadmin tasks related to backups, OS/Web stack patching, monitoring and so on.

Surely there had to be something better? Quicker, easier, less patching! The idea of a blog is to write not to be stuck in a never ending cycle of updates.

Ghost

So Ghost is relatively new to the scene having only started back 2013 and only gaining traction and popularity recently. This is my third run at using Ghost and it finally came to crunch time based on how long i was spending managing the hosting and CMS of the previous blog vs actually writing.

The export process from Wordpress to ghost was relatively painless using the official plugin located here and this set of instructions. The only issue for myself was around any blog entries with media included needed the images adding manually to the posts.

The move to markdown has made writing easier and more focused on the content vs using the built in Wordpress editor and with more consistent results when viewing the posts.

In terms of performance the load times appear to have decreased massively and this is due in part to Cloudflare (below) and the the CDN's built in to the Ghost managed platform.

Cloudflare

As part of the change i've finally migrated to using Cloudflare for everything from CDN to DNS and optimisation for this domain.

I've used cloudflare both personally and professionally for a number of years now, and the range of options can meet just about every need.

Depending on the hosting platform, cms and plugins - you may have some wonderful hacks you have to make to ensure it works with Cloudflare or you end up with control panel issues, themes not loading, borked plugins to name a few. Ghost now takes control of all the nuances with Cloudflare and it means zero management on my part. More time saved!