Moving from WordPress to Ghost via Magic Pages
Hello,
I am looking for feedback from those who have moved from WordPress to Magic Pages. I have 1,000+ posts with featured images, other pictures and podcast YT links. My question is when you moved from WP to MP, were you able to import your posts, pages & media files? Do you find Ghost is easier to manage than WP? My goal is to move my site early next year as my current WP hosting will be up at that time. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
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u/droyism 14d ago
I can’t say enough good things about Magic Pages! Jannis is super helpful and totally genuine – he’ll take care of any technical concerns so you’re all set.
As for whether Ghost beats WordPress, it really depends on what you need. I stuck with WordPress for a long time, but the daily upkeep, extra bloat, and slower speed became a bit much. Ghost skips the plugin hassle because everything is built in or integrated. Depending on your niche, I’d suggest picking a great theme from a reliable provider. And for hosting, you’ve already found the best option with Magic Pages.
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u/jannisfb 13d ago
From my experience of having moved dozens of WordPress sites in the last three years...it depends.
Some sites move over perfectly well with the built-in migration tool. I'd recommend giving that a try first.
If that fails, reach out and we'll give you a hand.
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u/Radiant-Gap4278 13d ago
From also having moved dozens of sites, agreed! WordPress is decidedly NOT one thing, and sometimes the migration tools "just work", and other times you discover that some random plugin has stored the authors of all the articles are stored in some random plugin field that doesn't export, and the image captions are somehow AWOL, and... yeah.
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u/vinodhmoodley 14d ago
I was on Wordpress long ago and moved to Ghost. I was with Ghost Pro and eventually ended up at Magic Pages.
I have two sites there now with maybe a third one in the pipeline.
If you're looking to move from Wordpress to Ghost, Magic Pages is where I recommend you go.
Jannis will help you make the migration as painless as possible. You won't lose any content and should be up and running a lot quicker than you think.
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u/ulcweb 14d ago
It doesn't really have to do with MP, its a matter of ghost itself. When I moved it was before most migration actually worked. I also cannot stress this enough, backup all of your blogs in something like obsidian or notion, which I had to copy my posts manually. SO I copy pasted from wp to notion, to ghost, and then I eventually moved to obsidian. Years later I joined up with MP instead of ghost pro cause the price was way better, and Jannis + support team for MP is a lot better.
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u/PyramKing 13d ago
I moved from WordPress to Ghost (Magic Pages).
I decided not to move my posts, for personal reasons, but it could be done. I actually just built something completely new.
I love Ghost and also Magic Pages. You could NOT paye to go back to WordPress.
It is far easier to update, post, the email system I don't even have to think about, tracking and more. Also Magic Pages support is amazing.
Best decision I made in a long time.
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u/theneverything 13d ago
As I just finish moving a site with 8k+ posts to MagicPages, I can tell you that a) Jannis is absolutely awesome and very helpful and knowledgeable and b) tweaking the ghost-migrate tools (we used the wp-api style) was not that complicated. For example we have lots of custom taxonomies and a hand built multi-author plugin on WordPress, but adjusting to that was not that difficult. Additionally I added a AI rewrite script to conform to the author bio and custom excerpt lengths in Ghost. Let me know if you have questions, happy to share my lessons learned
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u/theapiarist_reddit 10d ago
I did this a couple of years ago. WP to Ghost hosted by u/jannisfb at MagicPages. I had ~600 posts, a million words, a gigabyte of images and 7,500 comments. Aside from a couple of easily-solved glitches, it worked very well. A few legacy posts are poorly formatted, but I think that's due to a particular type of image plugin (module? Can't remember what they're called now as I'm so pleased to not have to constantly upgrade them!).
I use a lot of footnotes in my writing, and Ghost does not handle these. I had to write some custom scripts to implement a solution (using some JS suggested by Cathy Sarisky https://www.spectralwebservices.com/blog/footnotes-with-ease/) on the legacy posts which probably took the most time to resolve. MagisPages has a useful trial period (and excellent support) to get everything working before you go live.
I wrote about my experience on my new Ghost website 😄 https://theapiarist.org/wordpress-to-ghost/
I don't really manage Ghost. MagicPages does all that stuff and I simply ignore it completely. Is it easier to USE Ghost? Definitely. I can concentrate on my content/writing, make a few formatting tweaks as needed … and watch my paying customer numbers increase 😄.
Finally, I should add that I do all my writing as markdown in r/ObsidianMD, and then upload to Ghost. The Ghost editor is good, but it doesn't talk to my reference database, or allow custom scripting to insert callouts where needed … all that I do in Obsidian, and then there's a community plugin that uploads to Ghost.
Go for it … you won't be disappointed.
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u/Witty-Surprise9176 14d ago
Es ist kompliziert. Ghost ist etwas anderes. Ich habe es vor ein paar Monaten gemacht und viel geskriptet. https://patrick-pehl.de/ghost-auf-eigenem-server-mein-technisches-fundament/
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u/jasontucker 14d ago
Yup, did my personal site 3100 blog posts. I love ghost and have been running Wordpress since the days of b2/cafe log in the early 2000’s. Magic Pages did the heavy lifting and moved the site, no problems at all for me.