This article walks through every viable option for integrating a live job board into your Squarespace site and shows you how to do it as easily as possible — from Squarespace’s native page tools to ATS career portals, API-driven feeds, automation middleware, spreadsheet-based solutions, and third-party widgets. By the end, you will have a clear picture of which solution best fits your workflow, your ATS, and your technical comfort level, along with the practical steps to get your chosen job board live.

Squarespace’s Built-In Options: Custom Pages for Job Listings

Before reaching for external tools, it is worth understanding what Squarespace provides natively, because for smaller teams or agencies that manage a modest number of roles, its built-in content types can serve as a starting point.

Squarespace does not have a dedicated “Jobs” content type, but it does offer several page types that can be repurposed to display job listings:

Blog Pages are the most commonly used workaround. Each job listing becomes a blog post, with the post title as the job title and the body content containing the role description, requirements, and application details. Squarespace’s blog supports tags and categories, which means you can tag posts by location, department, or job type and allow visitors to filter by those tags. The Summary Block can then display these posts in a styled grid or list format on any page of your site.

Portfolio Pages offer a similar structure, with individual items that can each represent a role. These are well-suited to visually presenting positions, though the filtering capability is more limited than the blog approach.

Cover Pages and Blank Pages can be used to build simple static listings, though these require manual updates every time a role is added, edited, or removed and offer no filtering or search functionality.

The fundamental limitation of all native Squarespace options is that they are entirely manual. There is no connection to an external ATS, no automatic sync, and no two-way flow of candidate application data back into a recruitment pipeline. Every new job must be added by hand, every filled role must be removed by hand, and applications are captured through Squarespace’s own form system rather than being tracked inside your ATS. For a solo recruiter managing a handful of roles, this may be acceptable. For a busy agency handling dozens of live vacancies across multiple clients, it is impractical.

ATS Career Portals and Embed Options

The most reliable and professionally robust way to display a live job board on a Squarespace site is to use the career portal or embed functionality built directly into your ATS. Because the data lives in the ATS and the embed simply renders it on your site, there is no manual update process, no data duplication, and no disconnect between what candidates see and what your recruiters are managing.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse is one of the most embed-friendly ATS platforms available. It offers five distinct integration options of increasing complexity. The simplest is an iFrame embed: a few short lines of code that load your Greenhouse-hosted job board directly inside an iFrame on your Squarespace careers page. Candidates browse and apply without leaving your site, and all applications flow directly into your Greenhouse pipeline.

Beyond the iFrame, Greenhouse also provides a JavaScript snippet that loads jobs dynamically and inherits your site’s CSS styling for a more seamless visual integration. For teams with developer access, Greenhouse exposes a fully public JSON API that allows a developer to pull job listings, filter by department or office, and render them as native HTML elements styled entirely to match the site. Greenhouse explicitly names Squarespace as a supported website builder in its integration documentation. More Info

Workable

Workable provides an embeddable job widget — a few lines of code you copy from Settings > Integrations > Company website and paste into a Squarespace Code Block. The widget automatically displays your published positions and inherits your site’s styling, so it reads as a native part of your careers page rather than an external tool. Workable also exposes an API for teams that want to build a fully custom careers page, and the widget can be refined further with additional CSS and JavaScript. Note that embedding individual job or application pages inside an iFrame requires a custom domain on your Workable account. More Info

Lever

Lever takes a similar approach. It provides an embed code generator that produces a small JavaScript snippet, which you paste into the <head> section of your site’s HTML via Squarespace’s Code Injection tool. This generates a dynamic, automatically updating list of published job postings. Because the widget inherits your site’s CSS, it can be made to look like a native part of your site rather than an embedded external tool. Lever also exposes a public Postings API that returns job data as JSON, making it suitable for more customised rendering. Lever additionally offers a paid Career Site Builder for teams that want a fully branded, hosted career portal connected to their Lever instance. More Info

Loxo

Loxo lets you embed your live job listings directly via an iFrame. From your Loxo Careers Page customisation screen (More > Careers Page > Customize), select “Copy Embed Code” to copy a ready-made iFrame snippet, then paste it into a Squarespace Code Block or Embed Block. Your open roles appear automatically and stay in sync with your Loxo account. For a more deeply blended look, Loxo also exposes an Open API that a developer can use to render listings as native, fully styled HTML — though, as covered later, that route relies on authenticated API calls that Squarespace cannot secure on its own. More Info

RecruitCRM

RecruitCRM generates a unique public career page URL for each agency account. This URL can be referenced in an iFrame tag embedded on your Squarespace page, displaying your live job listings automatically. RecruitCRM also offers Recruit Craft, its own no-code website builder, which syncs directly with your RecruitCRM account as a standalone hosted career site. More Info

Crelate

Crelate has published Squarespace-specific documentation for embedding its candidate portal via iFrame. The process is straightforward: obtain the iFrame URL from Crelate’s settings, paste it into a Squarespace Embed or Code Block, and your live job listings appear on the page. More Info

Bullhorn

Bullhorn’s career portal offering is more technically involved than the others. Rather than a simple copy-paste iFrame, Bullhorn provides an open-source Career Portal — a self-hosted Angular application that pulls jobs live from your Bullhorn ATS instance. It includes a simple application form, an XML sitemap for SEO, and social sharing support, but it requires Node.js and Angular CLI to build and deploy. It is not a no-code solution.

Bullhorn does have a WordPress plugin (Matador Jobs) that integrates natively and deeply with the CMS — but no equivalent exists for Squarespace.

JobAdder

JobAdder does not offer a native iFrame or JavaScript embed for career pages. The most practical path for JobAdder users who want their jobs displayed on a Squarespace site involves either a third-party middleware layer (such as Refari, which syncs JobAdder jobs to a website without brittle iFrames) or the API-driven and spreadsheet-based approaches described in the sections below.

Recruiterflow

Recruiterflow includes a native iFrame embed that lists all open jobs and supports built-in filtering by department and location. This can be pasted directly into a Squarespace Code Block on a Core plan or above, making it one of the simpler no-code options for Recruiterflow users. More Info

Limitations for Certain ATS Platforms: The Server-Side API Problem

Not all ATS platforms expose public, unauthenticated job listing endpoints. Some — including Bullhorn, Loxo, and JobAdder — require authenticated API calls using private bearer tokens or OAuth credentials. This creates a meaningful technical barrier when working within Squarespace’s constraints.

Squarespace does not support server-side code. There is no PHP, no Node.js runtime, no backend, and no way to store private API credentials securely on the server. If you were to write JavaScript in a Squarespace Code Block that called an authenticated ATS API directly, the bearer token would be visible in the browser’s developer tools to anyone who inspected the page source. This is a genuine security risk and not an acceptable approach for production use.

The platforms most affected by this limitation include:

Loxo — Loxo has a well-documented Open API with endpoints for listing jobs, retrieving job details, and even accepting candidate applications, all using bearer token authentication. The API is capable and flexible, but the bearer token cannot be safely embedded in client-side JavaScript on a Squarespace page.

Bullhorn — Bullhorn’s full REST API also requires authentication. While Bullhorn’s open-source Career Portal can be self-hosted and uses the API securely on the server side, there is no simple embed option that achieves the same result on Squarespace.

JobAdder — JobAdder uses OAuth 2.0 for its API, which requires a backend server to handle the token exchange securely.

For teams using these platforms who want to display job listings on a Squarespace site without full custom development, there are two practical paths: the Make.com proxy approach, or the spreadsheet-based solution — both of which are covered in the sections that follow.

The Make.com Proxy: A Makeshift But Effective Middleware Solution

Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a no-code/low-code automation platform that can bridge the gap between an authenticated ATS API and a Squarespace website. While it is not a purpose-built solution, it is a genuinely viable one for technically comfortable non-developers who are willing to configure a few moving parts.

The concept works as follows. Make.com can receive an incoming HTTP request (via its Custom Webhook trigger), make an outbound authenticated API call to your ATS using credentials stored securely inside Make, and then return the job data as a JSON response to whoever called the webhook. Your Squarespace page uses a small JavaScript snippet to call the Make webhook URL, receives the job data back as JSON, and renders it as a styled list of jobs on the page.

In practice, the Make scenario consists of three modules:

Step 1 — Custom Webhook Trigger. Make generates a unique public HTTPS URL. This URL accepts GET requests from your Squarespace JavaScript. It is public but obscure — the URL itself carries no credentials and exposes no sensitive data.

Step 2 — HTTP Module. Make calls your ATS’s API (for example, Loxo’s /jobs endpoint) using the bearer token stored securely inside Make’s configuration. The ATS returns the full list of active job postings as JSON. The API key never touches the browser at any point.

Step 3 — Webhook Response Module. Make returns the job data as a JSON response to the original Squarespace request, with the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header set to allow cross-origin requests from the browser.

Your Squarespace Code Block then contains something along these lines:

fetch('https://hook.eu1.make.com/your-webhook-id')
  .then(res => res.json())  .then(jobs => {    // Render jobs as HTML with filters  });

Make also supports caching: using its Data Store module, the job data can be stored and refreshed only every 15–30 minutes, reducing the number of calls made to your ATS API and improving page load speed.

Limitations of the Make.com Approach

This approach is effective, but it comes with several honest caveats that teams should understand before committing to it.

Response latency. Each time a visitor loads the careers page, Make must process the request, call the ATS API, and respond. Without caching, this typically adds one to three seconds to the page load. With caching, the first response after a cache refresh incurs this delay; subsequent responses are faster.

Make plan required. The Webhook Response module and HTTP module are available on Make’s paid plans, starting at around $9 per month. The free plan is insufficient for this use case.

CORS header configuration. The Webhook Response module must be configured to return the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header. If this is omitted, browsers will block the response due to cross-origin security policies, and the jobs will not load on the page.

Jobs rendered by JavaScript, not server-side HTML. Because the jobs are rendered dynamically by JavaScript after the page loads, they do not appear in the initial page HTML. Search engines, including Google, do generally crawl JavaScript-rendered content, but it is not as reliably indexed as server-rendered HTML. For teams that place high importance on SEO for their job listings, this is worth noting.

Someone needs to maintain it. Make scenarios can break if the ATS API changes its endpoint structure or authentication method. Someone on the team needs to know where the scenario lives and be able to troubleshoot it if it stops working.

The Google Sheets + Shareables Solution

For recruiters who already use Google Sheets as part of their day-to-day workflow, the combination of a Google Sheet and Shareables.ai offers one of the most straightforward, no-code ways to display a live, styled job board on a Squarespace site.

What Is Shareables.ai?

Shareables.ai is a no-code widget platform that connects directly to your Google Sheets or Airtable data and renders it as a beautifully designed, embeddable widget — including job boards, team directories, event listings, product catalogs, and more. It requires no coding, no CSV exports, and no manual republishing. Once connected, any update made to the spreadsheet is automatically reflected in the widget on your website.

Widgets are fully customisable through a visual editor, where you can control layout, colours, fonts, filterable fields, and which columns from your spreadsheet are displayed. Shareables.ai connects to Google Sheets via OAuth — you authorise access once and the connection remains persistent, with no API key management required. Embedding is done via a single line of HTML that works on any website builder, including Squarespace.

How to Use Google Sheets with Shareables.ai on Squarespace

The workflow is deliberately simple and can be completed in under 30 minutes:

Step 1 — Set up your Google Sheet. Create a Google Sheet with one row per job listing and column headers that correspond to the information you want to display — for example: Job Title, Location, Department, Employment Type, Salary, Description, and Application URL. Each row represents one open role. To remove a filled role, simply delete or hide that row.

Step 2 — Connect Google Sheets to Shareables.ai. Sign up at Shareables.ai and create a new widget. Select the Job Board template. Click “Connect Google Sheets,” complete the one-time OAuth authorisation, and select the spreadsheet and sheet tab containing your job data. Shareables will automatically detect your column headers.

Step 3 — Map your fields and customise the widget. Use the visual editor to map your spreadsheet columns to the appropriate widget fields. Customise the layout, colour scheme, and typography to match your Squarespace site’s branding. Enable search and filter options for whichever fields are most relevant to your candidates — typically location, department, and employment type.

Step 4 — Copy and embed the code. Once the widget is configured, click “Embed on Website” and copy the generated embed code. In Squarespace, navigate to the page where you want the job board to appear, add a Code Block, paste the embed code, and save. The job board is immediately live.

Step 5 — Maintain jobs by updating the spreadsheet. From this point forward, adding a new role is as simple as adding a new row to the Google Sheet. Removing a filled role means deleting or archiving that row. Shareables reflects the change on your website automatically — there is nothing to republish, no dashboard to log back into, and no embed code to update.

Why This Works Well for Recruiters

Many recruiters, particularly those at smaller agencies or who work independently, already track open roles in Google Sheets — whether as a client-facing tracker, an internal pipeline overview, or a simple vacancy list. For these users, the spreadsheet is not an additional layer of complexity; it is already where their data lives. Shareables turns that same spreadsheet into a professional, public-facing job board without introducing new systems or requiring any technical knowledge.

Using Shareables with Airtable

For teams that use Airtable rather than Google Sheets, Shareables offers an equally seamless integration. Airtable’s richer data model — with linked fields, dropdown selects, and multiple view types — maps naturally to job board displays. Shareables connects to Airtable via OAuth in the same way as Google Sheets. Teams that already use Airtable as a lightweight internal ATS or client management system will find this combination particularly effective, as filtered Airtable views can be used to control precisely which roles appear publicly on the website.

Third-Party Job Board Widgets: Elfsight, MembershipWorks, and Similar Tools

A range of third-party widget services — including Elfsight, MembershipWorks, Common Ninja, and Webynize — offer embeddable job board widgets for Squarespace that require no technical knowledge to set up. These are widely marketed and easy to deploy, but they come with a fundamental architectural limitation that makes them unsuitable for most professional recruiters and recruitment agencies.

How They Work

These tools provide a self-contained job board that lives entirely within the third-party platform. You log into the widget provider’s dashboard, manually enter job listings by filling in a form, and the widget displays those listings on your website via an embed snippet. The entire job database is owned and stored by the widget provider, not by your ATS.

The Fundamental Drawback

The critical problem is that there is no connection to any ATS. These widgets do not pull data from Greenhouse, Lever, Bullhorn, Loxo, or any other recruitment platform. Every job must be added, edited, and removed manually — duplicating work that is already being done inside the ATS. For a busy recruitment agency managing dozens of active roles across multiple clients, this creates a parallel data entry burden that negates much of the efficiency that an ATS is designed to provide.

There is also no application pipeline integration. When a candidate applies through one of these widgets, their data goes into the widget provider’s system, not into the recruiter’s ATS. The recruiter must then manually transfer application information across, or set up a separate automation workflow to do so — which adds yet more complexity to a solution that was supposed to be simple.

Who These Tools Are and Are Not For

Elfsight, MembershipWorks, and similar widgets are genuinely well-suited to a specific narrow use case: a small business or organisation that does not use a dedicated ATS, has a handful of roles to advertise at any given time, and wants a visually presentable job listing on their website with minimal setup.

They are not appropriate for:

• Recruitment agencies managing live roles across multiple clients
• In-house HR teams using a dedicated ATS as their system of record
• Any recruiter who needs applications to flow directly into a pipeline
• Businesses that post, close, or update roles frequently
• Organisations that require candidate data to be held within a specific, compliant platform

For seasoned, professional recruiters, the manual overhead and the disconnection from the ATS are not minor inconveniences — they are structural problems that undermine the entire value of a live job board.

Conclusion

Every solution discussed in this article operates within the constraints of Squarespace’s architecture, and those constraints are real. Squarespace does not support server-side code, which means that regardless of whether you use a native ATS embed, a Make.com proxy, a Google Sheets widget, or a third-party tool, you are always working within a client-side-only environment. That environment introduces trade-offs around security, SEO, and real-time data access that a server-rendered platform simply does not face — and for certain ATS platforms, those trade-offs require workarounds that add complexity, cost, or ongoing maintenance overhead.

If your requirements go beyond what these solutions can reliably deliver — if you need a purpose-built ATS integration, server-side job rendering for better SEO, advanced search and filtering, or a career site that behaves as a true extension of your recruitment platform rather than a workaround within a website builder — then a custom-built solution on a more capable platform is the right answer.

For a customised recruitment website — whether built on WordPress with deep ATS integration or a bespoke solution tailored to your specific ATS and workflow — reach out to Codekyt for a build that fits your business.

One platform that has gained significant attention in recent years is Ghost.

Ghost is a lightweight, open-source content management system designed specifically for bloggers and publishers.

Can Ghost CMS surpass the renowned WordPress and become the ultimate choice for bloggers? To discover the answer, you’ll need to dive into the complete article. It will depend on factors such as your blogging experience, customization needs, and monetization goals. By exploring these aspects, you’ll gain insights into whether Ghost CMS can help you grow your audience more effectively and meet your unique blogging needs.

For instance, if you plan to earn money through Ad network and affiliate programs from your blog then you will be disappointed to know that Ghost CMS does not provide an out of box integration for these features.

But if monetisation through ads is not a major concern for you then Ghost has some inbuilt SEO and membership features which should be sufficient for those who are new to blogging and more focused on writing great quality content to grow their readers base.

Let’s explore some of the advantages that Ghost CMS offers, making it a better choice over other platforms, particularly WordPress.

Pros of Ghost CMS:

Simplicity and Ease of Use

One of the major advantages of Ghost CMS is its simplicity and user-friendly interface. The platform focuses on providing a streamlined writing experience, allowing bloggers to concentrate on creating high-quality content without distractions.

Ghost’s Markdown editor offers built-in support for Markdown syntax, allowing users to write and format content easily. The editor also includes gallery and embed cards for showcasing images and embedding content from various websites.

Ghost post editor offers a variety of easy to use snippets for content creation.

Snippets can be saved for frequently used content, while custom HTML and Markdown cards provide flexibility for more complex code or minimalist writing environments. Overall, Ghost’s Markdown editor provides a range of features to make content creation more efficient and customizable.

SEO Friendly

Ghost has all the essential built-in SEO features which gives it an edge over platforms like WordPress that has to rely on third-party plugins. Here are some of the highlights:

Title and Description Meta: Semantic page titles are automatically created but you can also manually edit them in page settings.

Social Meta Data: Structured metadata is automatically added to every page for Google, Facebook OpenGraph, and Twitter Cards.

Robots.txt: Ghost automatically creates a properly formed robots.txt file linking to your sitemap and excluding system folders.

Google Sitemaps: Ghost automatically generates and links to a complete Google sitemap including every page on your site.

Tidy Markup & Attributes: All generated markup is clean and semantic, containing proper alt attributes on images and link tags for RSS feeds.

Canonical Tags: Ghost generates the correct rel=”canonical” tag for each post and page to prioritize one true link.

Automatic RPC Pings: Ghost pings external services for indexing whenever new content is published to let them know the site has been updated.

Google AMP Built-in: Ghost allows for one-click enabling of Accelerated Mobile Pages across the site for superior ranking potential in mobile search results.

Google has an in-built metadata section for SEO in post editor

Speed and Security

Ghost CMS is renowned for its exceptional site speed which in turn helps in SEO rankings. With its minimal resource requirements, the platform ensures fast page load times, providing a smooth browsing experience for your readers.

Additionally, Ghost is also secure because it prioritizes security through regular penetration testing, automatic SSL certificate configuration with Let’s Encrypt, standardized permissions and data validation.

It basically means you get the best of both these essential features without doing any research work on your end.

Membership and Subscription

Ghost provides built-in membership and subscription functionality, allowing bloggers to create gated content and offer premium subscriptions to their readers. This feature enables bloggers to monetize their content and build a loyal community of members.

It also has an integrated newsletter service to send private posts as email newsletters to your paying subscribers.

Built in Analytics

Ghost provides membership stats to track the growth and engagement of your audience, including member signups, cancellations, and revenue. Additionally, post analytics tracking allows you to monitor the performance of your content, including views, reads, and social shares, to optimize your content strategy.

Ghost analytics page for subscribed members

Ghost also offers a user-friendly integration for Google Analytics or other third-party tracking services on your website. The Analytics code can be added through the global code injection feature, which is accessible from the Ghost admin settings menu.

Ghost Pro Vs Self Hosting

If you have read the article so far and been hugely impressed by the in-built features of Ghost then I want to touch briefly and explain to you about the two hosting options available to set up your Ghost site which is Ghost Pro vs Self Hosting.

Ghost Pro is a paid managed hosting provided by ghost.org starting at $9/month (annual plan) whereas Self Hosting is an option where you can download the open source version of Ghost and host it at your preferred VPS like DigitalOcean, Linode, Netlify etc.

Ghost pro has some serious advantages over self hosting like speed and security, CDN and site backups, automatic updates and integrated email newsletter service which is hard to overlook if you prefer simplicity and want to get started with your new blog as soon as possible.

Ghost pro vs self hosting features comparison

However, if you want greater control over customisation for your blog and don’t mind digging into complex technical documentation of Ghost which in my opinion can be a far challenging experience than using WordPress, then sure enough you can make the choice of self hosting.

Cons of Ghost CMS:

Monetisation Limitations

• Limitation of Ad & Affiliate Programs: Ghost CMS does not have built-in features specifically designed for managing ad placements or affiliate programs.To monetize your blog through advertisements or affiliate marketing, you may need to rely on external integrations or custom code implementation. For example, placements of ads are only possible in header or footer sections of a blog post as per default layout of Ghost CMS. To place ads anywhere else will require technical changes to the theme on a Self Hosting plan.

  You can check this article for more info about Adsense integration in Ghost.

• No built-in Marketing Page features: Ghost CMS primarily focuses on content creation and publishing, lacking built-in features for creating dedicated marketing pages. If you require extensive marketing functionalities such as landing pages or lead capture forms, you may need to explore third-party tools or custom development.

Example of an ebook marketing page

• Stripe Dependency: Ghost CMS relies on Stripe as its primary payment gateway for handling subscriptions and membership payments. While Stripe offers robust features and supports multiple currencies, this dependency on a single payment provider may limit your options if you prefer alternative payment processors.
• No native E-commerce: Ghost CMS does not provide native e-commerce capabilities, meaning you cannot set up a fully functional online store directly within the CMS. If you plan to sell products or services, you will need to integrate with third-party e-commerce platforms or explore custom solutions.

Post Writing Limitations

• No post version history: Ghost CMS lacks a built-in version history feature, which means you won’t have an automatic backup of previous versions of your posts. It’s recommended to manually create backups before making significant changes to your content.
• No hierarchical tags: Ghost CMS does not support hierarchical tags, so you cannot create a parent-child relationship between tags. This can make organizing and managing multiple tags for different topics more challenging, especially if you have a diverse range of content.
• NoFollow links: There isn’t a built-in editor option or shortcut to easily add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links, which is important for certain SEO practices and to indicate to search engines not to follow that specific link for ranking purposes. You will have to use an HTML card snippet for adding such links.

Few Themes & Customisation Option

While Ghost CMS offers a theme marketplace with a selection of pre-made themes, the choices are relatively limited compared to other platforms. If you are looking for a vast variety of ready-to-use themes, Ghost CMS may not offer as many options to suit your specific design preferences.

Also, after installing a theme you won’t get many options to customize it as you will be limited to the configuration settings provided by the theme developer.

No Plugins Ecosystem

Whether you love it or hate it, WordPress offers some great free plugins that can greatly enhance your blogging experience with customizable options. In contrast, Ghost focuses on integrations with third-party applications, often necessitating the creation of separate accounts on those services to access features which are not native to Ghost.

Ghost third party integration apps

Conclusion

Ghost CMS embraces a minimalistic design philosophy, ensuring that your blog looks clean, elegant, and professional. The simplicity of the default themes and the ability to write quality content easily make Ghost an attractive option for bloggers who prioritize a fast and efficient website.

However, Ghost may not be an ideal choice for everyone.

If you are looking for a platform that offers an extensive range of built-in features and comprehensive support for various blogging needs, you may need to explore other options.

Consider your specific goals and preferences before deciding if Ghost CMS is the right fit for your blogging needs.

Perhaps you are a WordPress blogger who found the platform a bit complex and technical to use and looking for a simpler alternative.

Maybe a regular business owner who wants to create a new website using an open source CMS and wondering if Ghost CMS is the right choice.

Well, don’t be confused, for I shall lift the veil of mystery surrounding Ghost CMS and enlighten you with its wondrous and some spooky secrets err.. I mean limitations.

Let’s dive in and learn more about Ghost CMS.

What is Ghost CMS?

Ghost is an open-source content management system (CMS) designed specifically for bloggers and publishers. It provides a minimalistic and distraction-free environment for creating and managing online content.

Unlike traditional CMS platforms, which often include complex features and functionalities, Ghost CMS focuses primarily on simplicity, writing experience, and performance.

Ghost provides a clean and simple interface for its dashboard overview

Ghost also offers a built-in membership and subscription feature that seamlessly integrates with its newsletter service.

As a Ghost site owner you can restrict certain pages and offer different subscription plans for your website, allowing visitors to sign up and become members. Members can access exclusive content, engage with your community, and enjoy personalized experiences on your site.

With newsletter service you can send customized email newsletters to your members whenever a new post is published on your site.

Let’s look at some of the features and advantages of Ghost CMS in detail.

Features of Ghost CMS?

Focus on writing and content creation

Ghost provides a delightful writing experience with its full-screen editor and deep integration of Markdown. Authors can focus on their content without distractions, thanks to Ghost’s clutter-free interface.

Additionally, Ghost provides access to a vast collection of high-quality images from Unsplash and allows customization through custom HTML and other snippet cards.

Theme Marketplace

Ghost CMS offers an exclusive theme marketplace where you can find a diverse selection of beautiful pre-made themes for free or commercial use. You can access this marketplace under the settings and easily download any theme with 1-click install process to enhance your Ghost website.

SEO-friendly

One of the main advantages of Ghost CMS over other platforms like WordPress is that it has SEO features directly built into its core, eliminating the need for third-party plugins. It generates clean and semantic markup, including alt attributes and RSS feed links.

The platform automatically generates Google sitemaps, adds structured data for search engines and social media platforms, and creates a proper robots.txt file.

With Ghost, you can customize page meta, define custom URL structures, and benefit from automatic RPC pings to notify external services about updates and new content availability.

Fast and lightweight

Ghost places a strong emphasis on performance, recognizing its significance in search engine rankings. With speed at its core, Ghost is a modern application that outperforms WordPress by up to 20 times, as verified by independent tests.

It also provides support for Google AMP Pages which boosts the site potential to rank higher in mobile search results.

Content Gating

Ghost includes a content gating feature that allows content creators to restrict access to specific articles, posts, or sections of their website. Content gating helps content creators monetize their work, build a community, and provide a more personalized experience to their audience.

In Ghost, you can restrict certain posts for members only

Built-in membership and subscription features:

Ghost offers a comprehensive membership system that enables seamless member signup, allowing visitors to access protected content by providing their email address. With recurring subscriptions powered by Stripe integration, authors can easily convert members into paying customers across 135 supported currencies with 0% payment fees.

Ghost also provides convenient features like import/export of members, webhooks for syncing with external services, email newsletters, detailed member stats, and efficient member management tools, including labeling, note-taking, and impersonation for quick member support.

Built in Analytics

Ghost provides easy to use integration for Google Analytics or third party tracking service for your website. The Analytics code can be added using the global code injection feature, which can be found in the Ghost admin settings menu.

Import & Export

Ghost provides you with full ownership of your content. All content can be exported at any time, without notice. Multiple tools are also available to import content and images into Ghost from other platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, Medium etc

Security

Ghost prioritizes security through regular penetration testing of its codebase and infrastructure. It automatically configures SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt and enforces standardized permissions and data validation.

It also employs strong password hashing, SQL injection prevention, brute-force protection, and dependency management for overall security and integrity.

Ghost Pro vs Self Hosting

If you have ever tried WordPress and you understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org then Ghost pro vs Self Hosting is kind of similar.

Ghost Pro is an official managed hosting service provided by creators of Ghost CMS, whereas the self hosting option means you can download the open source version of Ghost CMS and host it anywhere you want.

But there is a catch.. unlike WordPress which is built on PHP programming language and supported by many cheap hosting providers, Ghost uses Node.js and therefore its hosting options are limited and a bit expensive. Not to mention Node.js as a programming language is a bit difficult to learn and adapt, so you won’t be able to find development support for customizing themes for Ghost as easily as for WordPress.

Ghost Pro has some additional benefits over self hosting like site security, hosting performance, regular updates and integrated email newsletter service.

Ghost pro vs self hosting features comparison

In my opinion, if you are a content creator who is just starting out, then go with Ghost Pro. This way you can focus on writing great content, building your audience and not be worried about technical aspects of managing your site. 9 times out of 10 this option will serve you well for most use cases.

Once you have more than say 1000 subscribers and can invest a bit of time and money into development and self managed hosting then you can look to host your Ghost site on DigitalOcean or Cloud servers like AWS, Google Cloud etc. It will help you save cost over higher pricing models of Ghost Pro.

Limitations of Ghost CMS

Lack of Marketing Page

If you want to promote and sell a certain product like Ebook on your site, then it’s not possible to create an attractive landing page with a countdown timer and other features to drive sales for it.

Simple Header Navigation

I find it one of the major limitations of Ghost CMS. There is no default option in Ghost settings to group multiple pages in a multi level dropdown. This may impact user navigation and experience to find all content topics on your site. Basically you can only list limited topics in your main navigation without impacting the design of your site. Perhaps in future updates of Ghost CMS this issue may be fixed.

Limited Theme customisation

Theme customisation options are very basic and limited to changing color, font styles and background images of certain sections of your site as provided by theme developer. In order to edit HTML, CSS of a theme you will need to consider a self hosting plan.

Customisation options for a default Ghost theme under Settings > Design

No Media Management

There is no admin page in Ghost to view and manage all the media that you upload to your site. Also you cannot resize an image within a post after upload. Therefore, you have to ensure that all images you upload must be optimized and of proper size.

Blogging Limitations

When it comes to writing post content Ghost CMS has a few limitations which includes:

1. The text editor doesn’t have version history so it’s recommended to create backups before making changes.
2. You cannot create a child tag under a parent tag. If you like writing articles on many different topics then it may pose difficulty to manage them and it may appear disorganized in the admin backend.
3. Lack of markdown interface for adding nofollow links: If you want to create nofollow links for SEO purposes, you will need to use HTML code snippets.

Costly Development Support

If you are not a technical user and want to customize certain sections of your Ghost site on a self hosted plan then finding a reliable development support for your Ghost site can be bit expensive (compared to WordPress) due to Node.js programming and handlebars templating engine.

Final Conclusion: Who should use Ghost CMS?

Ghost CMS is primarily recommended for content creators and publishers who are looking for a clean and minimalist website design to build their audience and monetise their content through subscription. If you have been writing articles for Medium then you will find Ghost to be a better choice in terms of features and content ownership.

If you are a blogger who wants to write articles for their blog but also earn money through ads or affiliate programs then Ghost has certain limitations which you need to be aware of. Check this article

For other business owners who are looking for a general website to promote their services or products, Ghost is not recommended due to its limited design and layout options. I will suggest considering WordPress or other website builders like Wix, Squarespace etc for their business needs.