The main reason for me to switch from WordPress to Ghost for me was the comfort of the language and being able to write and read code as optimally as possible and to understand the underlying technology and make changes. Here's a few other reasons why I made the switch a reality.
WordPress has a lot of unnecessary junk
When you first install WordPress and set up your website you will notice something. Every single button that you click takes some time. Every single option that you try to change takes some time for you to able to actually make it function properly. This won't matter much if you don't use the internet a lot or browse a lot of sites but it becomes quite clear when you frequently visit websites that function butter smooth.
Those small split second holdups feel horrible. Technically you could use things like cache control and CDNs to speed up the website but still that's another hassle you have to deal with just to get everything up and running.
Will ghost without CDNs and cache control perform better than wordpress with those properties? Probably not. But the bulk still remains and you're better off with a ghost blog which uses a CDN.
Horrible for SEO Comparatively
I've run multiple blogs and some websites over the years some for fun some for profit. Setting up a WordPress website almost always required a lot of work to get it functioning properly for SEO. If you're writing a blog that isn't just for fun and specially if you're actually trying to rank for keywords site speed is a key component.
The reason is simple. Users notice even small holdups in site load and it can lead them switch to some other site very quickly.
By increasing your site speed you can increase your SEO potential by quite a lot. Even if you're using WordPress right now try to optimize your site so that it loads up quickly.
Now, I'm not entirely sure about the claimed +1900% speed improvement because I haven't run this test personally but you can notice the difference when you visit blogs running either frameworks with similar setup.
Clutter and content duplication
If you've worked with WordPress for ranking keywords you must have realized there's a lot of in built content duplication that occurs sometimes without you ever noticing.
All these duplicate articles floating around on the search engines can hamper your rankings.
In 2019 I was running a psychology blog and noticed a sudden improvement in rankings after I manually got rid of all the content duplication that was occurring.
Here's a quote from Moz about duplicate content.
When duplicate content is present, site owners can suffer rankings and traffic losses. These losses often stem from two main problems:
To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, and thus are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the best result. This dilutes the visibility of each of the duplicates.
Link equity can be further diluted because other sites have to choose between the duplicates as well. instead of all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, they link to multiple pieces, spreading the link equity among the duplicates. Because inbound links are a ranking factor, this can then impact the search visibility of a piece of content.
Can't leverage existing skills
This might be more of a personal issue but here we go, I don't like working with PHP. I know i'm not alone who thinks this way. Coding in PHP feels very ugly and it feels even worse when you go in to fix some of the broken plugins or themes in the WordPress theme editor.
You could spend hours trying to hunt down a simple bug that I could have figured out easily with something like ghost. I admit though this is because im more familiar with nodejs and more traditional languages than I am with something like PHP.
I bet there are PHP developers who are very skilled and can take care of most issues quickly. But its just not for me and most of the people who don't use PHP. Of course none of it matters at all if you don't dabble into the technical aspects or try to modify your blog.
Ghost is easier to understand technically
You can easily download the entire ghost code base and make and changes you want to make your blog function the way you want it to function.
The templating engine that Ghost uses is Handlebars and it feels much more natural to work with something that's more consistent and defined. Creating functions and adding it to your blog feels much easier than it does with WordPress.
Not to mention all the security issues that WordPress is known to cause. You might argue just don't write sloppy code and there won't be any security issues. But the problem is that its very easy for people to write sloppy code in PHP.
Horrible WordPress Post Editor
Every single time I wrote more than a thousand words in the Gutenberg post editor things became excruciatingly slow. I'd be writing words and watch them appear after 10 seconds. This should never happen and it caused issues to a lot of people. Sometimes i even felt like quitting writing all together because a activity that's supposed to be fun and pleasant became a pain.
I never understood why would WordPress push a feature so heavily that causes issues to so many people without running any proper tests.
Well, that's a rant is for an another day.
It's not all that bad
Summing everything up all it boils down to in the end is your comfort. Both WordPress and Ghost are excellent their tasks. Many people will swear by WordPress and never leave it and maybe they're right. WordPress after all does run majority of blogs and about 30% of all websites online. It does do some things better than Ghost like it has access to a larger library of themes and plugins. However, you can implement the same features in ghost quite easily with some knowledge of NodeJs, html and JavaScript giving you lot more control over features and security.
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