Why I decided to move BTTR from Wordpress to Ghost

I've been writing about tech for a long time. But it was only around 2013 or so that I started really paying attention to SEO as a traffic driver. When I launched TechRadar in Australia, part of that role was really zeroing in on Google as a primary source of traffic, following the global team's lead.

The global TechRadar team was exceptional at Google-sourced traffic (they still are, to be honest), so I learnt a lot in a very short period of time. It was incredibly rewarding, too, being able to see your byline appear in the first position on Google for a strong keyword.

When I moved to Finder, that focus on SEO doubled down. Everything was optimised for ranking and conversion. It was strategic, and very appealing to a part of my brain that likes order and reason.

When I decided to launch BTTR in the tail end of 2022, Google traffic was the business strategy. Sure, I'd launch social channels as well, but automated so I didn't need to focus my time on them.

I'd built a successful mini-business in Finder around product reviews, and I knew I could do the same for myself. Things started off really well. The first few months were all growth, with good success on the affiliate revenue front.

But Google decided to change the rules. Between September 2023 and March 2024, algorithm updates effectively deleted BTTR from search results. Even searching for a specific product review with "BTTR" as a qualifier resulted in nothing.

I almost threw in the towel. I've done that before when things got hard. But a combination of pride at what I had built and the enjoyment I get from writing for the site made me stop and think about how to move forward.

In the end, I decided to try and become an audience-first site.

Wordpress, the CMS Swiss Army Knife

I've been using Wordpress since 2008 or so. I love it. It's so easy to create something functional and stylish with even the most limited of skills.

The biggest reason I chose Wordpress when I first started was the ability to create a product database using WooCommerce. I also loved the freedom to find themes that fit my needs as a product review site with price comparison elements.

At one point, I had thousands of price comparison pages for tech and appliance products. They offered up to date prices from Amazon, eBay, The Good Guys and Kogan, and I could set and forget. I could then pull that price data into other content posts for up to date price information, without complex code or ongoing effort.

It was a unique offering, and I still think it would be incredibly valuable. However, because of the scale I rolled out, my gut says that was part of the reason Google penalised me. (The conspiracy theorist in me argues that I was offering a better service than Google Shopping and that played a part too, but I typically don't listen to that guy).

In the end, out of desperation I deleted that section of the site and tried to build around the content. It made no difference. Google had algorithmically penalised the site, and it wasn't going to get better on its own.

Ghost, the audience first platform

As I was debating how to move forward, I kept coming back to a couple of key thoughts:

1. Even if I did manage to get back in Google's good graces, I couldn't keep focusing on it as the primary source of traffic. Even if I diversified into social-first or video, I would still be at the behest of a stupid algorithm that could kill my success on a whim.
2. As much as video is huge and important for brands these days, it's not what I want to do. I enjoy writing, not performing on camera or editing a thousand terrible takes to find 2 minutes of usable footage.

With those two things set down, the path forward became clear. Owning my distribution channel via newsletter(s) became the only viable way forward. Sure, I can still optimise for search, share things on social and even play around with video.

But my primary focus needs to be building an audience. Wordpress offers plugins and tools to let you build an audience-first site, but it's not built around that.

But Ghost is. Unlike Substack, which is all about the newsletter, Ghost allows me to run a proper website, with newsletters as a distribution method. I can integrate them as much or as little as I want.

Show me the money

The other thing I love about Ghost is the tiered membership levels. After my struggles with Google, I want to reduce my reliance on the company's products. That means saying goodbye to Adsense, as well as switching to DuckDuckGo for search and Safari for web browsing.

BTTR was never an ad-first site, so it's not like I'm saying goodbye to a lot of revenue. But I wanted to find an alternative source of revenue to help support the site's costs.

Ghost's tiered membership lets me do that easily. I'm still not satisfied with the balance of paid vs free, but over time I'm keen to build clear levels of reader-support for the work I do.

So what's next?

The transition from Wordpress to Ghost hasn't been as easy as I'd hoped, thanks to the complexity of the plugins and theme I was using on Wordpress.

That means there's a bunch of messy broken links and images on the new Ghost site I need to fix up. There are about 300 posts I need to work through.

Once that's sorted, I need to break down the balance between public content, freely gated content and paid gated content. I'm not sure what that looks like for a site like BTTR, so if you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them.

And then? My goal is to keep publishing here for a long time yet. But I'd love it if I knew people were reading. So let's just see how it goes.