WordPress

I’m Moving My Personal Site and Blog Away From WordPress (and Choosing Astro + Ghost)

Philip Gaw

• 3 min read
I’m Moving My Personal Site and Blog Away From WordPress (and Choosing Astro + Ghost)
Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk / Unsplash

For a long time, WordPress was my go-to web development tool.

If I, or someone else, needed a site — blog, portfolio, landing page — WordPress could do it. And for many use cases, it still makes sense.

But for my personal site and blog, it slowly became more than what I needed.

This post documents why I’m moving away from WordPress, and why I landed on Astro for the site and Ghost for the blog.

WordPress Requires Too Much Overhead

To be clear, I'm not moving my site because WordPress is unpopular (WordPress is still a good choice for many people and organizations). I'm not moving because of any internet drama surrounding WordPress.

I'm moving because over time, my personal site started to feel like another machine that I had to babysit.

I wasn't just posting blogs, I was maintaining and updating themes, plugins and WordPress itself. Instead of using the site, I was managing it.

For this site, I didn’t need:

  • A database
  • Plugins and constant update cycles
  • A large admin surface exposed to the internet

But all that comes bundled with WordPress.

Why Astro?

Astro changed how I thought about the site.

Early version of the personal site - Structure and layout are pretty much in place, The visual is still evolving

With Astro:

  • The output is static HTML by default
  • There’s no server to babysit
  • Deployments are simple and reversible
  • Performance is a non-issue

It does exactly what I need.

Why Ghost for the Blog?

I still wanted a good writing experience.

Ghost editor view - clean writing flow without the need for plugins or themes

For these posts I wanted:

  • A clean and easy to use editor
  • Drafts and previews
  • Tags and publishing workflows
  • Minimal configuration

Ghost stays focused on publishing. It doesn’t try to be everything.

Costs and SSL Are Nice Side Effects of the Move

Cost wasn’t the primary driver, but the outcome is hard to ignore.

With Astro:

  • Hosting on Cloudflare is free or near zero for my usage
  • There’s no always-on infrastructure
  • SSL is automatic

Ghost hosted on Pikapods does have a cost but it's also minimal — around $2/month.

By comparison, with WordPress:

  • There are cheap hosting platforms but it costs time to keep WordPress running and updated
  • Some themes and plugins costs extra
  • SSL often requires extra configuration and add-ons

What’s Coming Next

This post is being published just ahead of the redesign going live.

The current personal site vs the redesign that is more focused on typography and spacing

The architecture is in place, but the visuals are still evolving. Over time, I plan to:

  • Bring the blog closer to the look and feel of the personal site
  • Use the same (or similar) typography and spacing
  • Make the transition between site and blog feel seamless
  • Spin off the cooking and recipe content into it's own dedicated site (thespicyit.com), also built on Ghost

Along with the redesign, the blog will also move to a new domain that better reflects its long-term direction. The content isn’t changing — just the presentation and where it lives.

So stay tuned.