Move your blog off WordPress
I'm Ronald. I spent three years on the core engineering team at Ghost® Foundation, and I built PixelGlass, an AI agent that designs custom Ghost themes.
If you write on WordPress and the writing is the part you actually care about, this page is for you. I'll move you to Ghost for free, and design the theme with you for a fixed $999.
Why Ghost
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform run by a non-profit foundation. It's a blog, a newsletter and paid subscriptions in one app, rather than a theme with a stack of plugins holding it together.
The editor is what people notice first. It's a quiet page that stays out of the way while you write, and the controls only turn up when you reach for them. After a few hundred posts, that matters more than any feature list.
Most of what you've bolted on is already in it: newsletter, member signups, paid tiers, analytics. Nothing to renew every year. And Ghost takes 0% of subscription revenue — you pay Stripe and nobody else.
The move is free
- Posts, pages, images, tags and authors, brought across.
- Your WordPress categories become Ghost tags, with the first one as the primary tag.
- Redirects from your old URLs, so the pages that rank today keep ranking.
- I do it. You don't export anything, read a migration guide, or touch the command line.
Ghost's own importer handles up to 2,500 posts. Past that there are open-source migration tools and I've used them — tell me how big the site is and I'll tell you straight whether it's still free.
What doesn't come across
I'd rather say this now than after you've paid.
- A real shop. Ghost sells member subscriptions, not a catalogue with a cart, variants and shipping. If WooCommerce is your business rather than a couple of ebooks, stay where you are — I'll tell you so.
- Custom post types, and plugins that gate content their own way.
- Unusual shortcodes. The common ones survive, including captions, code, audio and most Elementor and Divi blocks. The odd ones I fix by hand.
- Your old comment threads. Ghost has its own comments for members, but the existing thread doesn't carry over.
The theme is what you pay for
A Ghost theme designed around your publication rather than picked off a marketplace shelf. Fixed $999 and I help you go from a site that looks like 1000s others, to your own unique Ghost site with memberships.
What you end up with is a standard Ghost theme. Every file readable, installed on your site, yours to keep. It runs whether or not PixelGlass does.
Custom Ghost work usually starts around $2,000 and takes weeks. I can go faster because PixelGlass does the heavy lifting and I know all the ins and outs of Ghost. The price is low because I need the portfolio more than I need the margin — I'm taking four people this month. In return I'd like to show your site as an example of what PixelGlass builds. If you'd rather I didn't, that's fine and the price is the same. I'd just rather ask than assume.
Where it lives afterwards
I can host it for you from $12 a month. Or take it anywhere that runs Ghost — it's a standard Ghost site and you're not locked to me.
How it works
- You take a spot and send me your site.
- I move a copy across first, so you can write a post in it and see how Ghost feels before anything changes for your readers.
- We talk for half an hour about what you want the site to feel like. A written brief works too if you'd rather not get on a call.
- I design and build the theme, and you watch it take shape.
- We switch the domain over when you're happy, with the redirects already in place.
About two weeks from start to finish.
Who it suits
- You write far more than you sell.
- You're maintaining a plugin stack you never wanted, to do things Ghost does on its own.
- You already have an audience, and possibly a paid one, and you'd like to keep more of what it pays you.
- You'd rather talk to a person than dig through a settings panel.
Take a spot
Not sure yet? Email me at ronald@pixelglass.co and tell me what the site is. I'll tell you whether moving is a good idea, including when it isn't. I answer these myself.