Quick Links
Are you wanting to self-host your own blog? There are a lot of options out there for content management systems to handle your blog’s backend, and choosing the right one can be difficult. I’ll break down the pros and cons of WordPress, Ghost, and GitHub Pages to help you make the most informed decision.
Ghost
Ghostis a newer blogging platform but it’s taking the personal (and corporate) blogging space by storm. It’s available to eitherself-host on your own server(or even at home), or you can purchase a Ghost Pro subscription with managed hosting so you don’t have to lift a finger outside of actually writing.
Ghost Has the Best Built-In Writing Experience
I’ve used many content management systems over the years—WordPress, Magento, Blogger, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Drupal, Joomla, and others. This puts me in a unique place to comment on the actual writing experience that Ghost provides, and it truly is great.
The built-in Markdown editor is fast, fluid, and easy-to-use. It took me a minute or two to get used to the layout, but after that, I was right at home. Ghost’s editor mixes a slash-based writing experience (/image, for example) withMarkdown support.
The one thing that I’m not a fan of is that Ghost doesn’t allow pasting of Markdown-formatted content. You canwritein Markdown, but you have to paste rich text to retain formatting. This is simple for Ghost to fix in the future though with an update.
The Admin UI Is Clean, Fast, and Easy to Use
The content management system I have the most experience with is WordPress, which has a pretty complex admin interface—Ghost is the exact opposite.
All settings and tools are available on one of two pages. You land on the main admin page which houses your members, blog posts, and website pages.
Clicking the settings cog icon at the bottom brings you to the settings page that houses all of the other settings for your blog. This is where you choose the theme (and customize it), pick your membership tiers, handle all of your social cards, authors, navigation bar, integrations, and more.
In fact, every setting for your Ghost blog is on this one page, making it easy to scroll and find what you’re looking for.
Built-In Membership Tools Make Monetization Simple
One of the reasons that I love Ghost is how easy monetization is. Ghost has a built-in membership portal and integrates with Stripe so you may have free or paid memberships (and even multiple levels of paid memberships) without dealing with any other plugins or setup.
When writing a blog post or creating a web page, you can choose who has access, and the access control is actually pretty fine-grained. It can be set to allow everyone to view, all members (free included), paid, or specific member levels.
There’s No Plugin Ecosystem, but the Basics Are Covered
Ghost comes pretty full-featured right out of the gate. Functions likeUnsplashimage importing are natively supported, it hasbuilt-in, and I’ve already mentioned the membership tools that are a core part of Ghost. All of this functionality is built into the system and available without any external plugins.
In fact, Ghost actually just added comments natively, which used to require a plugin to use. Comments can even be changed from disabled to available to all members to only available to paid members, depending on what you’re wanting to give people access to.
The downside to this is that there’s no plugin ecosystem for Ghost like WordPress or other blogging platforms offer. There are a selection of integrations that Ghost offers, but there’s no plugin repository.
Creating a simple contact page for my blog took a few hours with ChatGPT to write the HTML. It can be hand-written if you know how to do it, and there are a few hand-picked integrations that can do this, but there aren’t dozens of plugins to choose from here. Your options are limited, and that could be a drawback to Ghost for you.
It’s Not as Flexible as WordPress—By Design
WordPress is extremely flexible—too flexible, some may say. Ghost is nowhere near as versatile as WordPress, and that’s okay.
This is actually one of my favorite things about Ghost. I don’t have to mold it into what I want it to be—Ghost is already what I need out of the box, and I don’t have to fight it like I do WordPress.
You’ll Need to Be Comfortable With the Command Line
Unless you opt for Ghost Pro (the managed version of Ghost), you’re going to need to be comfortable with the command line. Ghost is installed through ghost-cli, a command line interface for the blogging platform.
It’s honestly easy to use, and I deployed a Digital Ocean droplet for my Ghost blogs with a few clicks. Updating is easy, deploying more blogs is simple, and backing things up is a cinch. However, I have many years of experience with the Linux terminal, specifically with hosting websites. So this comes naturally to me.
If you’re not comfortable with the command line, then you’ll need to opt for Ghost Pro, which negates the benefits of actually self-hosting a blog and turns into paying someone else to host it.
WordPress
WordPress runs a vast majority of the internet. In fact,according to W3Techs, over 43% of all websites on the internet use WordPress in some form or fashion. It’s impressive, but that means that WordPress has to be able to be whatever a company needs it to be.
This is both a pro and con for the service. Similar to Ghost, you canself-host WordPressor choose to pay a host to manage it.
WordPress Has a Plugin for Everything
If you’re wondering whether WordPress can do what you need, the short answer is: yes. WordPress truly has a plugin for anything you could want. There’s a plugin toturn your website into a game ofAsteroids. Cornify is an odd plugin that will start tofill your visitor’s webpage with unicornsafter five seconds of inactivity.
Of course, there are normal plugins for WordPress, too. WooCommerceconverts your website into an ecommerce superstore, bbPress is designed to let youbuild out the forum of your dreams, and Sensei Pro lets yousell digital courses on your website.
The Ecosystem Is Massive—For Better or Worse
WordPress doesn’t just have plugins for everything, it has anything you could ever imagine for anything. There aretens of thousands of themes, a plethora of extensions,plugins more numerous than the stars, anddocumentation and tutorialsfor anything you could need.
This massive ecosystem is a benefit of WordPress, for sure. If there’s something obscure you want to do with WordPress, chances are that there’s a YouTube video or blog post walking you through the process. This can’t be said for all blogging platforms.
However, this expansive ecosystem comes with quite a few drawbacks, too. Free themes can be utter trash, and plugins that you rely on can become abandoned because you were one of five users that relied on it, which wasn’t enough to support the developer.
With WordPress plugins, themes, and other add-ins, you really have to do some research up front. I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on themes over the years, and several have become end of life as the developer simply felt that it wasn’t worth their time to keep updating it, leaving me in a lurch to find a replacement theme, re-customize it, and re-launch.
Customization Is Easy, but Can Get Out of Hand Fast
Speaking of customization, WordPress makes personalizing your website quite easy—but it’s also complex at the same time. WordPress has a built-in website editor that works for a majority of what you’re going to need, which is great.
Depending on the theme you choose, the theme itself could have its own editor and customizer that works outside of the WordPress native tool. Then you also have hand-coded pages, which are a monster in and of themselves.
Customization comes easy in WordPress, but depending on what you’re looking at doing, things can become ultra-complex, so just be careful with that as you start your website up.
You Can Build More Than Just a Blog
I already mentioned all of the plugins that WordPress offers, and that’s honestly its biggest benefit. If you want an ecommerce store with zero blogging, it can do that. Need to sell digital courses without writing a single blog post? It does great at that.
Do you just want a simple blog? WordPress can do that too. Really, what your WordPress site looks like or does is entirely in your hands. There’s no right or wrong way to use the content management platform.
It’s Powerful, But That Power Comes With Overhead
I love how extensible WordPress is, but that’s honestly why I chose Ghost for my own personal blog. All of the power that WordPress ships with definitely comes with additional overhead.
The backend of WordPress can slow down and sometimes even become unresponsive when writing a post—I’ve had this happen many times. The frontend of your website can suffer from performance issues unless you know how to make Wordpress bend to your will.
The Admin Dashboard Can Feel Cluttered
Because of all the plugins that are offered with WordPress, the admin interface can become a bit overcrowded and uncontrollable. I’ve had an admin interface so complex that I had no idea where some settings were located and had to use the find shortcut in Chrome to figure out where things were.
However, this is just a necessary evil when you have software that can be as complex or simple as you need it to be. To achieve all the functionality that WordPress does, it has to have a complex admin interface so that way it can handle all the capabilities that you integrate.
Hugo + GitHub Pages
GitHub Pageshas been around for over 15 years at this point, but it only became popular recently. GitHub Pages is different from a traditional content management system as it’s designed to be a static site host,not a dynamic host.
This is a limitation, for sure, but with the right tools, you can easily build a blog fromthis free static site generator. You’ll need a few additional tools, and you’ll also miss out on some functionality that Ghost or WordPress offers. However, GitHub Pages is completely free, which could be a huge benefit for you.
To create a GitHub pages blog, you’ll need a way to generate the HTML for each blog post or page. While you could hand-code each page, using something likeHugois much simpler. With Hugo, you can write in Markdown and then generate the HTML to send to GitHub Pages for your website.
This isn’t necessarily self-hosted, as GitHub is hosting the actual website—but Hugo is self-hosted and your blog posts/web pages are written and processed on your machine.
Hugo Sites Are Incredibly Fast
Because there’s no overhead or content management system, a Hugo-based site on GitHub Pages is extremely fast. There’s no backend to load, no plugins to wait for, and pages just simply load fast.
You Can Deploy for Free With GitHub Pages
Because Hugo is generating static HTML web pages, you can host your website on GitHub Pages for free. You’ll lack certain features of other platforms, like dynamic inventory management of an ecommerce website or membership tools like Ghost offers.
However, GitHub Pages is completely free to use and isn’t bound by your own server’s uptime, making it an ideal solution for those that don’t want to self-host but aren’t ready to pay for a server.
There’s Zero Backend to Maintain
Because Hugo websites are pure Markdown and HTML uploaded to GitHub, there’s no real admin interface to deal with. You have the GitHub interface, sure, but that’s just normal code revision. Everything else is done in HTML.
This makes some tasks a bit more complicated (like uploading themes), but also allows the sites to be much faster because there’s no overhead.
Theme Variety Is Solid, but Can Be Hit or Miss
There is actually apretty big selection of Hugo themesto choose from. There are even somewebsite buildersout there for Hugo.
However, the quality of Hugo themes can vary greatly. Since most of these themes are done by smaller studios or independent developers, the quality is entirely dependent on that developer’s knowledge of code and theme building.
You’ll Spend More Time in a Text Editor Than a Browser
Since Hugo and GitHub Pages websites are static and written in Markdown and HTML, you’ll spend very little time in a browser. With Ghost or WordPress, pages and blog posts are all crafted in a browser because that’s where the website lives.
So, if you plan to run a Hugo website, pick a good Markdown-based text editor before starting—you’ll thank yourself later.
Great for Developers, Not So Much for Casual Users
Given how much of a Hugo/GitHub Pages site is hand-coded, this method really isn’t for casual users. Ghost or WordPress is definitely a better option there.
However, if you’re already a developer (or want to become one), then Hugo with GitHub Pages is a solid option all around.
You Have Full Control—But That Means Doing It All Yourself
One of the best things about a Hugo/GitHub Pages website is that you’re in control of everything front to back. If you want, there’s not a single piece of code that you have to use from someone else.
This is a downside too, though, as that means you have to hand-code everything unless you find a few snippets from other people that can help you figure something out. There’s not a ton of documentation out there in comparison, either.
Image and Media Management Can Be a Chore
While Ghost and WordPress have native image and media management tools, Hugo with GitHub Pages does not. If you want to insert an image or video, it has to be done manually.
You’ll need to upload the media to another site and then embed it, rather than keep it on the same server as the rest of the website.
Personally, I use Ghost for my blog. I started off with itself-hosted at home, and now keep it on a Digital Ocean droplet because it’s affordable and has nearly 100% uptime.
If you’re ready to deploy a website at home (even on a Raspberry Pi), simplyfollow my guide on setting up a Pi-based website. I use Ghost as an example, but you could swap it for WordPress or Hugo easily if that’s the platform that you prefer.
