Of course, you might love WordPress because your are used to it.
But, did you know that there are better platforms available in the market that are better than WordPress?
Platforms that are meant just for BLOGGING!
I'm talking about Slypress and Ghost CMS, which both of them are better Wordpress alternatives if you just want to focus on blogging, improve your content and grow.
In this article, you will learn difference between Slypress, Ghost and Wordpress, and why I personally decided to ditch WordPress altogether for blogging purposes.
Things you need to know about Slypress, WordPress and Ghost
Wordpress is now a general CMS platform - people are using it for ecommerce, info websites and blogging. Is not dedicated to blogging anymore - so let's see if this is a problem, comparing to Ghost and Slypress - both dedicated to blogging!
Wordpress
WordPress was founded back on May 27, 2003 - built on top of PHP (programming language) by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
During those days, Joomla used to lead the CMS world but the fact that WordPress had a much better UI started winning over uaround the world.
According to data from W3Techs, WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet in 2022.
Ghost
Ghost Blogging CMS was initially released on 14th October 2013 by John O'Nolan.
Ghost is an open source blogging platform which makes writing pleasurable and publishing simple.
That led him to create his Kickstarter Campaign and he broke the internet by raising £196,362.
Ghost CMS is built on NodeJS which is relatively a hot new coding language being adopted by some companies to speed up the website and applications (not really, is more like a dogma).
You might ask is ghost blog free?
Yes! Ghost is an open source project, and it's 100% free.
But: you have to install, host yourself and maintain yourself.
This lead us to Slypress - a combination of both, but a lot better, solving most blogging issues!
Slypress
Slypress is a wordpress alternative but having Ghost performance.
This is huge and very unique!
Slypress require no installation because it is a SAAS blogging platform (Service As A Software).
Slypress blog is built on top of PHP 8 - the newest programming language, using JIT technology (Just In Time).
At this time, wordpress is not yet compatible with PHP 8 but Slypress was writen from scratch using it - this is why Slypress is a lot faster than any existing blogging platform.
Of course, the main advantages using Slypress blog:
- you don't have to maintain or upgrade
- you don't have to worry about security
- you don't need SEO (is all inclusive as part of Slypress)
- you don't need to pay hosting (which in some cases is very expensive)
- you don't need to additional CDN for your images (Slypress include a global CDN network)
- you don't need to pay additional link audit tools
Slypress is helping you to start a blog in seconds (literally) and focus all your energy on writing, not fixing, updates, optimizations and stuff nobody wants.
Yes, is that simple!
So Slypress is a combination of Wordpress and Ghost, solving most blogging issues!
Slypress blog is not free but you start with as low as equivalent of 3 coffees!
→ How to create a free Wordpress blog: a step-by-step guide
WordPress challenge
WordPress is undoubtedly an amazing platform because you can create more than a blog.
Many people started their career on WordPress, so this is why many people are still using Wordpress - this a human problem: we are driven by habits (we are very mechanical beings)!
Hosting companies are offering Wordpress packages but there are some significant challenges which Slypress solved.
WordPress has grown from a normal blogging platform to a full-fledged Content Management System.
And this is making it very, very slow because it is bloated with functions you never use! More functions require processing power!
You could say it's durn good, but this shift has also lead to several issues.
WordPress plugins
WordPress's plugin system is a boon to the CMS industry because even someone who doesn't know how to write "Hello World" code, can start a website with the help of WordPress.
But you require a plugin for pretty much everything if you don't know how to code, from SEO options to pretty much everything.
This can be good, as you get the functionality you look for right away, but it can be awfully frustrating since it slows down your website big time.
Most of the plugins are coded by various developers and each developer has his own way of coding (writing the code), leading to slow communication between the website and each plugin.
Website designers are using 11-13 plugins on an average for each website, and their biggest challenge is slow loading websites.
So many people ditched WordPress and moved the blog to Slypress or Ghost.
WordPress themes
Another big challenge is related to WordPress themes. Many people say that is a good thing, but is that so?
Please keep in mind that I have 20 years experienced as a web developer and I used to sell premium themes on various marketplaces. I still do!
Any wordpress theme (including premium ones from Themeforest or other similar marketplaces) require lots of optimization because there is too much happening with the theme: most of the themes are built on a framework and plugins, which can have strange interactions.
All premium themes are bloated with options - this means a very slow website. It's almost impossible to get good SEO results from a theme out of the box. Require optimizations.
As an example, you will never see on top of Google SERP a blog using the most popular blog theme on Themeforest. That wordpress theme was sold so far, over 800K times!
Is a nice theme but almost useless - develppers around the world buy it for their customers because is "free money" - I hope you get it!
→ 5 ways to make money with a blog
Ghost vs WordPress: Blog Engine
I have just one word for Ghost Blog CMS, "It's Beautiful" Sorry, I meant two words!
Ghost, as I was talking earlier, is built on NodeJS powered by Expres framework.
The most beautiful part about Ghost is that you don't need any plugin.
You might be wondering, what about the SEO creeps and stuff?
Ghost handles everything with ease! They have coded everything into the core of the software so that you don't need many plugins.
That makes Ghost quick and easy to implement, and you don't have to deal with optimizing your site or pages for better loading speed.
→ Do you need a website for your blog? Pros and cons explained
Ghost vs WordPress: As a Website
This is where WordPress takes a big leap over Ghost.
Ghost is designed beautifully for blogging purposes but lacks the flexibility when comes to building the website.
Whereas WordPress has grown to become an amazing CMS that can help you build a website in less than a day.
You might ask: then why not just use WordPress?
To some extent, you could, but...
Your Web Pages are constant; you build them once, and you don't touch those pages unless you are doing some major changes.
Your busiest section on your entire website would be your blog because you might be doing a product review, or working on your next blog post, or making an update about your company's monthly progress.
Which means you need to make sure your blogs are well designed and easy to read, so you need fo focus a lot of attention on this aspect of the website.
That would lead to your next question: Why not have both?
You could, but it's very language because WordPress is built on PHP, while Ghost runs on NodeJS.
Unless you have some good technical knowledge, it will be a bit tedious to figure out.
Hence, making a decision is crucial.
This is where I would recommend building your blog using Slypress.
WordPress takes a big lead over Ghost just because WordPress has been around for a lot longer.
If you are not very technical person and need a full-fledged site, then Wordpress is a better option for your requirements.
If you are not tehnical at all and you need a blog, then Slypress is the best option you can get! And belive me, Slypress is killing it!
This blog you read is Slypress. 😍
Ghost vs Wordpress: performance, speedtest and optimization
I am sure you will love this section - you get some real stats.
For this purpose, to make things fair, I will use the exact same datacenter (Los Angeles) where Slypress platform is.
1. Wordpress instalation + testing
Here are the GTmetrix performance stats for the test:
- PageSpeed Score: 98%
- YSlow Score: 78%
- Page Load Time: 1.5s
- Total Page Size: 258KB
- Requests: 14
That's very impressive for WordPress out of the box setup.
Time for Pingdom Tools test:
- Perfomance Grade: 88
- Load time: 364ms
- Faster Than 98% of the trusted sites
- Page Size: 291.4kb
- Requests: 14
2. Ghost instalation + testing
Ghost was also installed on the same machine.
Here are the GTmetrix performance stats for the test:
- PageSpeed Score: 100%
- YSlow Score: 95%
- Page Load Time: 0.8s
- Total Page Size: 112 KB
- Requests: 10
Time for Pingdom Tools test:
- Performance Grade: 88
- Load Time: 328ms
- Faster than 98%
- Page Size: 121.1 kB
- Requests: 10
That's a performance improvement of over 130.36%, in terms of loading time.
The power behind this performance is NodeJS. But technological knowledges are required to setup and tune.
You will get similar results when you run a test even when you have posts on Ghost full of content, images, and videos.
The last thing you want is visitors leaving your website due to slow loading speed. 53% of visitors are doing this!
3. Slypress instalation + testing
Slypress require no installation because it is a SAAS blogging platform (Service As A Software).
Here are the GTmetrix performance stats for the test:
- PageSpeed Score: 100%
- YSlow Score: 94%
- Page Load Time: 0.5s
- Total Page Size: 121 KB
- Requests: 10
Time for Pingdom Tools test:
- Performance Grade: 91
- Load Time: 375ms
- Faster than 98%
- Page Size: 131.2 kB
- Requests: 10
Slypress is very similar to Ghost. Is using the same technology WordPress does, but behind it is a monster-caching technology (this is the secret sauce).
If the above reason is not sufficient for you to switch your blogging engine...
Increase in visitors
I am going to share some real data that will really amaze you.
Switching to Ghost has improved the number of visitors on my personal blog.
After switching to Slypress (Ghost might be an alternative, if you are a technical person), the loading speed of the site went down from 3.5 seconds to close to 1.2 seconds and the blog loads in less than a second.
Not only that, I have seen an increase in sale by 36.2% on a month-to-month basis, just by switching to a faster technology. Boy, this is huge!
If you are yet to build your blog, then you should consider Slypress as your preferred blogging engine (or Ghost if you like to install, maintain and update).
WordPress & Ghost: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This is the most critical section; I would recommend you to not skip this.
When it comes to SEO, the biggest challenge with WordPress is this:
Many of the required SEO settings are not built directly into the core of the CMS which is very much needed nowadays.
But this where the Kickstarter-backed CMS Ghost leads the CMS category.
Let me first talk about WordPress, and the plugins that are required for SEO purpose.
WordPress gets heavily spammed! You need askimet or some premium antispam plugin (which costs you money)!
You also have to install some SEO plugin. Today is not that important but you need a SEO plugin, if you want advanced SEO on Wordpress.
Any SEO plugin gives you tons of SEO settings, that requires a whole different optimization tests and the issue here: SEO takes days, weeks or even months to get something noticeable.
You would require a cache plugin, and two of the most popular cache plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and so on - you have to test them, of course!
Remember about Slypress caching?
Slypress blog is a SAAS platfoem, already having a cache technology (not a plugin - we are talking about a bunch of REAL SERVERS). None of them has this: Ghost or Wordpress.
The cache plugin is vital to speed up WordPress.
If you don't use a cache plugin, you are literally out of any business! You will not rank in Google (or SERP - Search Engine Ranking Page) with a slow website - these days are history!
As you can see, that's a lot of plugins already, on top of which we are talking about more optimization plugins for various purpose.
The biggest challenge, after all, is to pick the right WordPress theme for your website. Picking a wrong theme, might lead to various issues - including speed issue.
Finally, you will require one of the Social Media Open Graphics and Twitter Cards plugins to optimize your contents for social media.
Let's talk about Ghost blogging CMS, and how it handles the several SEO settings as compared to WordPress that was discussed above.
The most beautiful thing about Ghost is that the entire blogging engine is built on NodeJS with Handlebars as the templating system.
Slypress is even better than Ghost, but if you for some reason want to go with Ghost, it's all good. Would be very smart to thest them both!
Most of the above feature in WordPress, each requiring a plugin are coded into the core of the Ghost application.
All the SEO settings, along with the images, etc. are set automatically.
WordPress frustrations and the reason to switch to Ghost
Loading Speed!
Wordpress websites are having a very baaaad time when it comes to load speed!
WordPress has grown so much that has moved away from just being a blogging CMS to full-frame CMS.
Unless you spend a good amount of time on optimization (theme, plugins, server), you cannot expect a good loading time as compared to Ghost, which has amazing load speed out of the box.
Your biggest challenge might be to ensure how to make sure that the people coming to your website were sticking around for as long as possible.
You might be shocked to find out that a quick loading blog will impresses them, and visitors will stick around for a longer time.
While WordPress is popular, I found it a lot more expensive to fine-tune and maintain WordPress for my ongoing blogging purpose where I am publishing a lot of contents lately.
I decided to give a try to Slypress. Everything changed, literally!
Not only I am ranking very well for my targetted keywords, but my Bounce and Exit % is quite impressive.
Anyway, a CMS is not magic wand – you still have to focus on high-quality content.
How Ghost UI makes you want to write more?
Before I even begin bragging about their UI, let me say this: it's so beautiful that it makes want to write more.
Your production might go from 1000 words (On WordPress) up to 2500-3000 words per day (On Ghost).
Reason: distraction free writing.
Challenges associated with Ghost
Nothing is perfect, not in this universe!
I have given you a lot of reasons why you should go with Ghost as your blogging CMS.
But there’s one way as of now where WordPress pulls ahead of Ghost as a frame, and that's scalability.
Slypress is even better when it comes to scalability!
WordPress has been around for years, and the number of themes, plugins, developers and support that you will find for WordPress is not available for Ghost Blgging CMS.
Keeping that in mind, if the above factor doesn't stops you, and if you don't need any fancy plugin then Ghost might be an alternative!
Slypress is a lot better than Ghost but is up to you.
Conclusion
In the end, it all comes down to the requirement and setup that suits best for each of your project.
I hope you enjoyed this post, and if you did... then please share the article on your preferred social media platform.