Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Sanity to Ghost
We are the Sanity to Ghost migration experts
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Challenges with Sanity
Key pain points
We obviously prefer Sanity, so much so that our own website is on Sanity. But if you don't have the right implementation team, you might find yourself in a bad situation. Its highly customizable nature can lead to complexity and time-consuming setup processes for less experienced developers. We've inherited our fair share of stinkers, but we advise that before you jump ship, you let us look over it to see if it's salvageable.
That said, if you are considering moving, we can help you migrate away with automated migration scripts, web scraping, and content mapping. It'll be a 1:1 with whatever platform you choose.
Not always plug-and-play
Sanity gives you a ton of flexibility, but it’s not a “drag-and-drop” CMS. If your team prefers instant themes and presets, you’ll need a little extra setup to get started.
Potentially high resource demand
As your content model grows, Sanity gives you incredible power and real-time performance. Just keep in mind that very large projects may require a bit more horsepower behind the scenes.
Less ideal for beginners
Editors love Sanity once everything is set up, but teams switching from traditional CMSs may need a short onboarding period to learn the workflow.
Infrastructure management needed
Unlike hosted CMS platforms, you own your content pipeline. That gives you full control and scalability, but also means setup and environments need to be managed properly.
Technical skill required
Since Sanity is schema-driven, developers can model content precisely the way your business needs it. Non-technical teams benefit from that structure, but setup usually requires engineering support.
Complexity in setup
Sanity doesn’t force rigid templates or assumptions. You have to define everything like content, structure, and workflows. The tradeoff: a bit more initial setup for much more flexibility long-term.
Benefits of Ghost
Key advantages
Ghost is genuinely great if all you want is a fast, clean, no-nonsense blogging machine. It keeps things beautifully simple: a slick Markdown editor, zero clutter, and performance scores so good they’ll make WordPress users cry into their PHP logs. If your plan is “just publish content,” Ghost actually gets out of your way and lets you do that.
The built-in memberships and payments system is also a win. You can slap a paywall on your content, charge people to read your mediocre hot takes, and do it all without duct-taping together 12 plugins. For solo creators, small publications, and anyone who wants a simple writing-first experience, Ghost delivers exactly what it promises and nothing you didn’t ask for.
Lightweight JSON API
Ghost’s API is fast, predictable, and doesn’t make you fight a schema just to fetch a title. It’s perfect for JAMStack setups where you want speed without ceremony. Pull content, ship pages, move on with your life.
Intuitive Markdown editor
If you enjoy writing without 19 toolbars screaming at you, Ghost’s Markdown editor is bliss. Clean, distraction-free, and actually enjoyable to use.
Built-in membership system
Memberships, paywalls, and subscriptions come built in, no plugin Frankenstein required. Hook up Stripe and you’re basically running your own mini-Substack in minutes.
SEO-friendly defaults
Ghost ships with fast performance, clean URLs, structured data, and proper metadata, without needing an SEO plugin the size of a small country. Most sites hit solid scores straight out of the box.
Native subscription support
You don’t need 3 SaaS tools duct-taped together to run a newsletter. Ghost handles email delivery, subscriber lists, and automated posts natively.
Easy theme customization
Themes are simple to tweak thanks to Ghost’s handlebars-based templates. If you know basic HTML/CSS, you can make it look exactly how you want without fighting a visual builder from 2011.
Common questions
Sanity to Ghost migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Sanity to Ghost migration
Why should we migrate to Sanity instead of another headless CMS?
Sanity's Live Content API means content goes live the instant you press publish, with zero caching issues. We've migrated teams from WordPress, Contentful, Drupal, and legacy platforms, and the consistent feedback is that the editorial experience is faster and more flexible. The schema-as-code approach means your content model is version-controlled alongside your codebase. Pricing starts free for small teams and scales predictably, unlike platforms that hit you with surprise API overage bills.
What does a migration to Sanity actually involve?
A typical migration has three phases. First, we map your existing content model to a Sanity schema, which usually takes 1 to 2 weeks depending on complexity. Second, we build automated migration scripts that transfer your content, media assets, and relationships. Third, we set up the frontend integration and editorial workflows. For a mid-sized site with 500 to 2,000 pages, the full process usually runs 4 to 8 weeks. We use our Turbo Start Sanity foundation to accelerate the setup so you're not starting from zero.
How long does it take before our content team is productive in Sanity?
Most editors are comfortable within the first week. Sanity's Presentation tool gives them a side-by-side live preview that feels intuitive, especially for teams used to visual page builders. The real-time collaboration means multiple editors can work on the same document without conflicts. We typically run a 2-hour onboarding session and provide a custom guide tailored to your specific content model. After that, editors rarely need developer support for day-to-day publishing.
How much does Sanity cost?
Sanity's Free plan includes 20 user seats, 10,000 documents, 1M CDN API requests, 250K regular API requests, 100GB of assets, and unlimited locales. The Growth plan is $15 per seat/month with 25,000 documents and the same API allowances, plus pay-as-you-go overages and 5 roles including Editor, Developer, and Contributor. Enterprise pricing is custom for organisations that need custom roles, SLAs, or private datasets. Most mid-size teams we work with stay well inside Growth's limits.
How much does Ghost CMS really cost beyond the "free" open source version?
Ghost is free to self-host, but "free" is misleading. You'll need a VPS ($5-$20/month minimum), someone to handle server maintenance, security updates, SSL certificates, and backups. That's either your time or a developer's hourly rate. Realistically, self-hosted Ghost costs $50-$200/month in labour and infrastructure for a small team. Ghost's managed hosting (Ghost Pro) starts at $9/month for the Starter plan (500 members), jumps to $25/month for Creator (1,000 members), and scales to $199/month for the Business tier. Once your membership list grows past a few thousand, costs climb fast. We've seen publishers hit $300+/month on Ghost Pro before questioning whether the platform still made sense for them.
Does Ghost need a developer to maintain it?
If you're self-hosting, yes. Ghost runs on Node.js and requires regular updates, database maintenance (MySQL), and server monitoring. Major version upgrades (Ghost 4 to 5, for example) can break themes and integrations, and someone technical needs to handle those. On Ghost Pro, maintenance is handled for you, but customisation still requires a developer. Custom themes use Handlebars templating, and anything beyond basic styling means editing theme files and redeploying. If your team is purely non-technical and you want to go beyond Ghost's default themes, you'll need developer support on an ongoing basis.
When should you migrate away from Ghost?
Ghost hits its ceiling when you need more than blog posts and newsletters. If you're trying to build landing pages, manage structured content across multiple page types, run an ecommerce store, or handle multi-language content, Ghost wasn't designed for any of that. We've migrated publishers off Ghost when they outgrew the "blog plus newsletter" model and needed a real content platform. The migration itself is painless. Ghost's JSON API makes content extraction simple, and posts map cleanly to markdown. The typical timeline is 4-6 weeks to move content into a headless CMS and rebuild the frontend.
Can Ghost handle a site with more than just a blog?
Barely. Ghost gives you two content types, posts and pages, and that's it. There's no custom content modelling, no relational fields, no structured data beyond tags and authors. You can hack together something with custom routes and internal tags, but it's brittle and hard to maintain. If you need case studies, service pages, team directories, or any structured content beyond articles, you're fighting the platform. Ghost is excellent at what it does. It just doesn't do very much. For sites that need a blog alongside other content types, a headless CMS gives you the flexibility Ghost intentionally leaves out.
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