Why I Moved My Blog from WordPress to Ghost

I didn’t move my blog because I was chasing new features.

I moved because I wanted fewer moving parts.

Over time, the way I think about email has changed, privacy, and digital systems has changed. I’ve become more aware of “how complexity creeps in — and how often that complexity becomes the weak point in digital systems we trust. The more layers you add, the harder it is to understand what’s really happening underneath.

Eventually, I realised my website didn’t reflect the same principles I talk about elsewhere.

So I changed it.

I didn’t just want a blog — I wanted control

Modern websites are rarely simple.

Themes depend on builders. Builders depend on plugins. Plugins depend on other plugins. Each piece might be well-made, but together they create a stack that’s difficult to fully understand and even harder to maintain with confidence.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s just the reality of how most sites evolve.

But the more parts a system has, the more updates it needs, the more things can conflict, and the more potential entry points there are if something goes wrong. Keeping everything patched and secure becomes a constant background task.

I didn’t want my publishing setup to feel like ongoing maintenance. I wanted it to feel stable and predictable.

WordPress is powerful — and that power comes with complexity

WordPress can do almost anything. That’s why it runs such a large portion of the web.

But that flexibility comes at a cost.

To get the exact experience you want, you usually end up adding plugins for design, performance, security, SEO, backups, forms, and more. None of these are bad on their own. Many are excellent. But each addition increases the number of moving parts you rely on.

Security in that kind of environment often becomes a matter of layering tools on top of tools — firewalls, scanners, monitoring services — all trying to protect a system that keeps growing.

WordPress can absolutely be run securely. But doing so often means adding more, not less.

I wanted to move in the opposite direction.

Fewer moving parts means fewer things to go wrong

When I discovered Ghost, what stood out wasn’t a long feature list. It was the restraint.

Ghost is opinionated. It’s built primarily for publishing. It doesn’t try to be an e-commerce platform, a page builder, a membership plugin marketplace, and a marketing suite all at once. It focuses on writing, publishing, and sending content to readers.

That narrower scope means less reliance on bolt-on functionality. Fewer plugins. Fewer dependencies. Fewer background systems quietly doing their own thing.

Just like with modern email authentication, I’ve learned that simplicity is often a security feature.

Performance, privacy, and trust

A leaner setup doesn’t just feel calmer to manage — it also changes how the site behaves.

Fewer scripts mean faster pages.

Fewer third-party tools mean less data being shared behind the scenes.

A simpler stack makes it easier to understand what your site is actually doing.

None of this makes a site magically “secure” on its own. It reduces the surface area — the same principle behind zero-access systems.

That aligns much more closely with how I think about digital tools in general.

This wasn’t about features. It was about alignment.

Ghost doesn’t do everything WordPress can do.

That’s the point.

I didn’t switch because I wanted more features. I switched because I wanted a setup that matched my priorities: clarity over customisation, stability over endless options, and a smaller, more understandable foundation.

In the same way I prefer paid email services that are clear about their boundaries and design choices, I wanted a publishing platform that felt deliberate rather than endlessly expandable.

Your tools shape how you work

The tools we use don’t just enable our work — they influence how we think.

When your website depends on dozens of interconnected pieces, you start thinking in terms of patches, updates, compatibility, and workarounds. When the system is simpler, your focus shifts back to the work itself.

Moving to Ghost didn’t just change my backend. It changed how I feel about running this site. It feels less like something I have to constantly manage and more like something I can quietly rely on.

That’s the same feeling I’m looking for in email, privacy tools, and the broader systems I trust with my digital life.

And that’s why I moved.