Ghost to a custom site
The best tool for a job you might not have
There are four questions below. Two of the answers tell you to stay on Ghost, and if that is where you land you should close this page and go back to work.
Before anything else
Ghost is very good, and this page is not an attack on it
The editor is the best writing experience on the web. Sites are fast without anybody tuning them. Memberships, paid tiers and newsletters are built into the product rather than bolted on, and they work. It is open source, the export is clean, and there is no lock-in to escape.
It is also completely open about what it is for. Ghost’s own headline is “Turn your audience into a business”, and it describes itself as an app for professional publishers to grow a business around their content1. That is not marketing vagueness; it is an accurate description of a narrow and excellent product.
Which is the whole of the problem. A great many small businesses are running a professional publishing platform to serve a site with eleven blog posts and a contact form, because somebody technical set it up and liked it. The platform is not failing them. It was never aimed at them.
The fit test
Four questions, honestly answered
Answer them about your business rather than about the business you keep meaning to become.
Do people subscribe to you?
- Yes
- Then Ghost is doing the single hardest thing on your list, and doing it natively. Memberships, paid tiers, newsletters and the billing behind them are the product rather than an add-on. Nothing in this price range does it better and you should stay.
- No
- Then you are paying for a subscription business you do not run. Ghost's pricing is organised around member count before anything else, so the shape of the bill is describing somebody else's company.
Is writing the main thing your site does?
- Yes
- Stay. The editor is genuinely excellent, publishing is frictionless, and the whole product is built around getting words out regularly. If somebody at your business writes every week, that is worth more than anything below.
- No
- Then the best part of the product is the part you are not using. Most small business sites publish a handful of times a year, which means the editor you were sold on is idle and the constraints around it are not.
Does your site need pages that are not articles?
- Yes
- Service pages, location pages, a pricing table, a real contact form, a booking flow. Ghost can hold pages, but shaping them means editing a Handlebars theme, so every layout change is a developer task rather than an afternoon.
- No
- Then the constraint never bites. A site that is a stream of posts and an about page is exactly what Ghost is built to be, and it will do it faster and more cleanly than a custom build.
Does more than one person need to change things?
- Yes
- Check which tier you are on. The entry plan includes one staff user; three requires the next tier up. For a business where an office manager, an owner and a marketing person all occasionally need access, that is a real constraint on a plan chosen for a blog.
- No
- Then it is a non-issue, and you can ignore the pricing section below entirely.
The answers in chartreuse are the ones that argue for keeping Ghost. If two or more of yours are in that colour, the rest of this page is not for you, and the cheapest good decision available is a better theme rather than a rebuild.
How it usually goes
Nobody regrets choosing Ghost in the first month
The problems are not visible at launch, which is exactly why businesses end up here. Told in the order they actually arrive.
The first month
Nothing is wrong at all, and this is worth saying plainly. The site is fast, the writing experience is better than anything you have used, and the theme you picked looks sharp. Most Ghost sites for small businesses are set up by somebody who likes Ghost, and they are right to like it.
Around month six
Somebody asks for a page that is not an article. A proper services page with three columns and a price table, or a landing page for one campaign. It turns out the answer is a theme edit, and the person who set the site up has moved on. The page gets published as a long blog post instead, and it reads like one.
Year two
The subscription is still being paid, the member count is still zero, and the blog has eleven posts, nine of them from the first quarter. What you are paying for is a publishing platform that is not publishing, and the part of your site that earns money — the service pages, the contact form — is the part it was never built to do.
Two facts underneath that story, both from Ghost. Its plans are organised around member count, with the entry tier covering up to 1,000 members and a single staff user2. And its themes are Handlebars templates, so a new page layout is a code change rather than a setting3. Both are entirely reasonable decisions for a publishing tool. Both are the wrong shape for a business whose website exists to win work rather than readers.
Ghost exports cleanly and does not fight you on the way out, which is more than most platforms manage and worth crediting. Posts, pages, images and tags come across intact. The blog keeps its URL structure wherever it can, and where it cannot, redirects are built from a crawl of the live site rather than from the export, because the export does not know what Google has indexed.
What replaces it is a site built in Next.js and hosted on Vercel, deployed from a repository in your name, with scaling and security handled here. Pages become whatever each page needs to be. If you have a newsletter list it moves to a dedicated email service, which will send email better than any website does.
The method is the crawl, redirect map and rebuild set out on the migration page, and what the new site is like to own is on the web design page.
Ghost is often chosen as the thing WordPress was not. If you are weighing that comparison from the other side, the WordPress page.
Follow-ups
Mostly from people who like Ghost
No, and this page would be worthless if it pretended otherwise. Ghost is the best publishing platform in its price range, the editor is excellent, it is fast by default, and the memberships system is better than anything you would assemble from plugins elsewhere. If you publish and you have subscribers, stay where you are. The argument here is only about fit.
The cost is not the problem. The shape is. Ghost(Pro) tiers are organised around how many members you have — the entry plan covers up to 1,000 with one staff user, and the next tiers exist mostly to raise those numbers. If your member count is zero and will stay zero, every upgrade path available to you is priced against a metric your business does not have, and the thing you actually need more of — pages, layouts, people who can edit — is the thing the tiers do not address.
Often yes, and it is the cheaper answer worth trying first. A well-chosen theme fixes a lot, and if the gap between what you have and what you want is mostly visual, buy a theme rather than a migration. What a theme does not fix is needing page layouts that differ from post to post, because Ghost themes are Handlebars templates and every genuinely new layout is a code change made by somebody who knows the templating language.
Posts, pages, images and tags all export cleanly — Ghost is unusually good about this and there is no lock-in to fight. Members and subscriptions are the harder question, and the honest answer is that if you have a real paying membership you should probably not be moving at all. If you have a free newsletter list, it exports and goes to a dedicated email service, which is usually better at sending email than any website is.
Pages that can be whatever the page needs to be, without a theme edit. A site built around the things that bring you work rather than around a publishing feed. Hosting on Vercel from a repository you own, with security and scaling handled here. And no subscription tied to a member count you do not have. What you lose is the best writing experience on the web, which is a real loss and not one to wave away.
Two to four weeks and the $2,500 to $15,000 web design range, at the lower end of it for most Ghost sites because the content is already clean, the structure is simple and the export is painless. If the blog is substantial, preserving its URLs and getting the redirects right is where the care goes rather than where the cost goes.
Sources
Three pages, all Ghost’s own. Nothing on this page needs a third party to establish it, because Ghost is candid about what it is built for.
- 1
Ghost homepage — The project's own description of what it is for. Checked September 2026.
- 2
Ghost(Pro) pricing — Published tiers, member limits and staff user counts. Checked September 2026.
- 3
Theme development documentation — What building or changing a Ghost theme requires. Checked September 2026.
Tiers and limits are current to September 2026 and Ghost revises them from time to time. If the pricing page disagrees with this one, the pricing page is right.
Tell me your answers to the four
Send the site and how you answered. If two of them came back in favour of Ghost you will be told to stay, which costs me a project and saves you one.