If you're using Cloudflare for your domain AND hosting your website with FirePress (or any external hosting provider), this guide ensures your site works perfectly with both services. Skip this if you're not using Cloudflare.

Why These Settings Matter

FirePress automatically manages SSL certificates for your website using Let's Encrypt. Cloudflare also provides SSL features. Without proper configuration, these two systems can conflict, causing:

• Certificate renewal failures (which are very random and hard to debug)
• Site downtime
• Security warnings in browsers

This one-time setup ensures both systems work together seamlessly.

Required Cloudflare Configuration

1. SSL/TLS Encryption Mode

Navigate to: SSL/TLS → Overview
Set to: Full (NOT Full strict)

Why: This allows Cloudflare to accept the SSL certificates that FirePress automatically generates for your site.

2. DNS Records

Navigate to: DNS → Records
Add: CNAME record pointing to your assigned FirePress server
Proxy status: Orange cloud (Proxied)

Example:

• Type: CNAME
• Name: @ (or subdomain)
• Target: yoursite34td.firepresshosting.top (already provided by FirePress)
• Proxy: ✓ (orange)

3. Cache disable cache

4. Page Rule for Certificate Renewal

Navigate to: Rules → Page Rules
Create rule for: *yourdomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/*

Why this configuration is needed: This ensures FirePress can automatically renew your SSL certificates every 90 days without Cloudflare interfering.

You Are Set

These settings create a perfect partnership:

• Cloudflare provides DDoS protection, CDN, and performance benefits
• FirePress handles your hosting and automatic SSL certificates
• Your visitors get a fast, secure experience

No further action needed - your certificates will auto-renew forever.

Having Issues?

Contact FirePress support. We'll help you get it sorted quickly.

Introduction

Considering a website revamp? Transitioning from WordPress to Ghost might be your perfect solution! Ghost rivals WordPress with its ease of use and emphasis on content presentation. It's daunting making the switch, but let us help you navigate this with a seamless step-by-step guide. From understanding what elements can be migrated to installing the required plugins, we'll help you every step of the way. Embrace the change; the Ghost community awaits you!

Before the Migration: Ghost handles most WordPress features splendidly; making sure that posts, pages, tags, authors, and images move without hassle. While custom fields and shortcodes may not migrate, Ghost boasts inbuilt features eliminating the need for extra plugins or clutter.

Step 1: Plugin Installation

The first stop on this journey is installing the Ghost Export Plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/. Sign in to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to 'Plugins' on the sidebar menu. Hit 'Add New' and search for 'Ghost Export' in the search bar to find our plugin provided by Ghost Foundation. Follow the prompts to install and activate the plugin.

Step 2: Preparing WordPress Content for Import

Once activated, go to 'Tools' and then 'Export to Ghost' on the sidebar. This will present a guide to prepare your content for Ghost.

Within WordPress, your content is classified into categories and tags. But Ghost utilizes a more simplified organizing technique, it only uses tags. To make this change, use the Taxonomy Converter plugin in WordPress, to effectively change all your categories into tags.

Caution! This action will permanently change your content structure on WordPress. If unsure, create a backup of your content using 'Export' under 'Tools'.

Step 3: Exporting Content from WordPress

With your content now prepared, return to 'Export to Ghost' in 'Tools'. Click 'Download Ghost File' to download a zip file containing your content.

If faced with troubles in exporting due to huge data content or processing time, click '.json' beneath the download button. This action will generate a single file containing all your posts, pages, and tags, skipping the image downloading step.

Step 4: Importing to Ghost

You're almost there! Sign into your Ghost admin panel. Under 'Labs' view, click 'Choose file' within 'Import content'. Select your downloaded zip file and hit 'Import'. And just like that, your content from WordPress is now available on your Ghost site.

This step-by-step guide is aimed to provide a seamless transition to Ghost while preserving the essence of your WordPress content. Keep your zip file (or .json file) ready. All it takes is a few clicks and voila; your Ghost blog is ready.

Take a minute to breathe and pat yourself on the back. You’ve navigated through a significant segment of your transition journey.

Post Migration Actions

Congrats on successfully migrating your content from WordPress to Ghost. But there are a few housekeeping actions to ensure your transition is seamless.

Tweaking Content and Settings

Start by verifying the successful migration of your posts, pages, images, and tags. Don't forget to check if the authors are aligned with their content. If you notice any issues, ensure to weed them out at this stage before moving further.

Ghost flags any duplicate or malformed content during importing, so keep an eye out for any anomalies. If Ghost does flag something, carefully review those flagged portions.

Reset Passwords

Authors from WordPress get migrated to Ghost without their passwords. Authors need to reset their passwords and can do so by logging into Ghost and following the prompts. Secure passwords are vital in sustaining your website's safety.

Images and JSON Data

If your website includes a high number of images, you might find it more useful to upload multiple, smaller zip files, each containing around 100MB of images, one zip file at a time.

Upon migration, the JSON data file from WordPress may require some modifications to align with Ghost's formatting. This change mainly applies if your exported data still contains the former WordPress domain. If your Ghost site is using a different domain, open the JSON file and modify the URL structure using find and replace to replace the old domain with the new one.

Changing Domains

Switching domains could be a pivotal part of your migration process. So, if you've elected to hang your hat at a new domain post-migration, ensure your URLs match your new home.

If you've chosen to change your domain post-migration, update your URL accordingly in the JSON file to match your new home. You're familiar with this process by now—unzip the export file, open the JSON file in a code editor, and use find and replace to substitute the old domain with your new domain. Following this, zip the export once more to secure your changes.

Wrapping Up

An admirable round of applause for you – you've successfully transitioned from WordPress to Ghost. Now, skim through your content, revisit your tags and authors, and ensure everything looks fantastic on your Ghost site.

To transition your Ghost website to FirePress, we presume you are acquainted with configuring your domain or DNS for FirePress servers. Simply adhere to these instructions.

Prerequisites for Migration

1. Obtain or request the ghost/content/* directory from your website.
2. Export and secure a backup of your content (a *.json file). Navigate to: Settings > Labs > Migration options > Export. From this location, download the *.json file to your computer.
3. You are required to transmit the ghost/content/* directory to us. To facilitate this, compress (zip) the ghost/content/* directory along with the *.json file.
4. Utilize services such as wetransfer.com, dropbox.com, JumpShare, or a comparable platform to upload your zip file. Refrain from transmitting zip files directly within an email, as it consumes excessive space.
5. Kindly forward a link where we can retrieve this zip file at relations AT firepress.org.
6. FirePres will copy your data into your Ghost instance.
7. Import your data from your backup (see Step 2). Navigate to: Settings > Labs > Migration options > Import. From this location, upload the *.json file to your computer.

If assistance is required during the migration, our services can be provided for a nominal fee. Contact us for further information.

Regarding ghost/content/ directory

This directory encompasses images, database, logs, settings, themes, and more.

Please be cognizant of the fact that FirePress' esteemed clientele will not possess the ability to access our server through SFTP, SSH, or any alternative method.

Potential Downtime

A modicum of downtime may transpire during the migration. We encourage you to consult this post for a comprehensive understanding of the reasons behind this occurrence.

Configuring Ghost for sending emails to your members requires two essential configurations:

1)  SMTP Credentials

The SMTP configurations, which play a pivotal role in ensuring proper email delivery, are completely managed by our team at Firepress. These configurations are vital for various transactional email services, including:

• subscription confirmations
• login recovery
• secure login links
• emails to staff users
• etc.

2) API Key

At Firepress, we take care of managing the API keys for you. Once you receive the necessary information from us, simply copy and paste it into the designated sections of the configuration. The following values will be shared with you:

• Mailgun Private API key
• Mailgun region
• Mailgun domain

To configure your API key, please follow these steps:

1. Access the Admin Panel.
2. Navigate to the Settings section.
3. Locate the Email Newsletter settings.
4. Proceed to the Mailgun configuration.

By adhering to these configurations, you can ensure seamless email communication with your valued members.

The right way is to go to your Namecheap account, click on manage next to your domain. In the domains tab, navigate to NameServers section and you need to select Custom DNS on the main page and add the NameServers.

Use the two NameServers used at FirePress in the dotted lines and click on the green tick to save the changes.

Avoid this mistake!
When you go to the Advanced DNS section on Namecheap you can only add NameServers for a subdomain and not the bare domain.

Having a homepage is optional, but it's a powerful feature. It's the default page your visitors will come across. An homepage is sometimes referred to as a landing page, a splash page, as a static page or as a lead page.

Structure

A homepage is the best way to focus the user's experience and guide your visitors into a specific part of your website, which is managed by Ghost. Its design can be totally different than the pages managed by Ghost. Two examples:

Your domain structure could look like this:

pascalandy.com/ (custom homepage)
pascalandy.com/blog/ (ghost)

Another way of seeing it is to say :

• the homepage (pascalandy.com) lives under root /
• the /blog lives under a subdirectory

Or, if you prefer, you could set up your domain this way as well:

juliaburns.com/ (custom homepage)
blog.juliaburns.com/ (ghost)

You are the designer

You have to be aware that you are responsible to design your custom homepage (HTML, CSS, JS). As the owner of your website, you can use any static page you want. You could download this landing page, tweak it and host it in front of your Ghost website. FirePress is not a website builder after all.

In the future, we might offer templates that are easy to customize, but we can't provide a timeline at the moment.

Pricing

The cost of hosting a custom homepage is only 90$ per year.

You must have an active plan for Ghost with us prior to adding a homepage in front of your Ghost's website. If you only want a homepage on FirePress, we will charge you the same price as our Ghost yearly plan.

Don't hesitate to contact us for more details.

How does it work?

You have two options:

1. Using Git
2. Send us a zip file

1. Workflow option using Git

We assume you can do basic git commits in a GitHub repo. All the configurations are fully managed by FirePress.

Here is what you get when you sign-up for our homepage plan:

• FirePress will create a new private repo. This is where you will host the code for your homepage.
• The URL will look like https://github.com/firepress-org/[YOUR_SITE]
• Send us a quick email (at relations@firepress.org) and tell us which email you are using on GitHub. We will add you to this git repo.
• From now on, you will work on this repo to do any updates on your homepage.
• Every commits made on the master branch will be deployed on your homepage thank to the CI/CD. This means that on every commits, the system will push your code the your website.
• You will see all the details on each builds! Check this out as an example: https://github.com/firepress-org/ghostfire/actions/workflows/build.yml
• Updates are applied to your homepage

Rules we must agree with:

• Your homepage's code (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS) must be under the /public directory.
• Your homepage file must be named /index.html directory.
• Don't update/modify/delete branch edge because it's reserved to FirePress folks.
• Yes, you can invite other people like freelancers. Send us a quick email (at relations@firepress.org) and tell us which email this person is using on GitHub. We will add him/her to this git repo.
• On this plan, we host pure HTML/CSS/JS sites. If your site needs a specific framework like NodeJS or PHP, please contact us.

Best practice:

You should work on a "dev" branch while you code. Merge to master only when your code is production-ready.

2. Workflow option using a Zip file

If you simply want to send us a zip file once in a while, it's fine too :-p

Staging site

You might consider having a staging site at your disposal. For example, you can commit to branch staging and see the results of your work at stg.example.com

A) For which instance(s) do you need a staging site?

• Your homepage and/or your Ghost instance?

B) Which domain URL structure do you want?

In Production, you could have something like:

• example.com/ (homepage prod)
• example.com/news/ (Ghost prod)

In Staging, you could have something like:

• stg.example.com/ (Homepage staging)
• stg.example.com/news/(Ghost staging)

Regarding pricing, we will simply add more plans (homepage, Ghost) for each staging site required.

At this point, we assume you know what are the steps to migrate your Ghost site to FirePress. There could be some downtime and that's why we need good communication at the point. Just help us to help your website being online 😊.

1. Send us the files needs as explained here.
2. We will prepare your site on our servers (but I won't launch it yet).
3. We will ask you to set your DNS depending on the three options you want.
4. Shoot us an email to confirm you pointed your DNS to our server (does not apply if we manage the DNS for you).
5. We wait till DNS points to our servers. It usually takes less than two hours.
6. We will launch your website.
7. Our system will generate the SSL/TLS certificates (you know the https://)
8. At this point, your site is up and running!

Why this little downtime? It's very technical. To generate TLS certificate to the LetsEncrypt server, your DNS must point to our servers. LetsEncrypt limits for a perfectly reasonable reason the number of a request that can be made on their servers. Requesting certificates without having your domain name pointing to our server is considered as spam.

There are three options to host your website at FirePress. It depends on how much you want to care about this part. Do you want to keep controlling and managing your domain yourself, or do you wish not to be bothered with it at all?

DNS configurations options at FirePress

As a client, the big advantage of using option A or B is that we manage everything for you. You can forget about:

• Caching configs
• CDN configs
• DDoS config
• DNS records configs
• SSL certificates
• domain verification
• the Mailgun account
• Create tokens/SMTP/API keys from Mailgun
• www redirection (when needed)
• and other fancy things

If you go for Option C, we assume that you are a power user with enterprise requirements. But if you need help about your DNS configurations while using option C, FirePress will need to charge for this custom work. See our pricing page for more details.

Option A

It's the easiest way to go! You never have to think about it any of this. If you don't have a domain name, we can register it for you when you choose our annual plan.

• FirePress is responsible for the DNS records
• FirePress is responsible for the domain name

Option B

Responsibilities are shared:

• FirePress is responsible for the DNS records
• Client is responsible for the domain name

From your registrar account, you must point the NAMESERVERS (NS) to our servers. To do so, find the relevant information here:

• General configuration: How to update your nameservers from your domain registrar to point them to Cloudflare?
• If you are on Namecheap: How to change your NS (NameServers) records on namecheap.com

This will allow us to control all aspects of your DNS configs (A, CNAME, MX, TXT, etc.). You will benefit from having Cloudflare features like caching, CDN, DDOS attack protection, etc.

Option C

This is for power user and people that knows what that are doing:

• Client is responsible for the DNS records
• Client is responsible for the domain name

From your registrar account, you point the CNAME to our domain name. We will share the TARGET URL after you have paid for your plan.

Here is an example of how you would configure your domain to point to our servers:

TYPE	NAME		TARGET
CNAME	mybusiness.com	mybusiness.firepress.site

Migration

Thinking about doing a migration of your existing Ghost site to FirePress? Please refer to « How to do a Ghost migration to FirePress? ».

We also wrote a great post about the reasons you might want to do so. Please refer to « 8 reasons to host your Ghost website on FirePress ».

Downtime

Some downtime might happen while updating your DNS record(s). Please refer to this post to understand the impacts.

Q&A

A common question:

Hi, it is possible to set up Ghost blog like this:

1. Our website www.starty123.com is hosted on Shopify
2. For blogging we want Ghost to be on www.starty123.com/blog

I saw some documentation stating that “Ghost requires reverse proxy(Nginx, Apache) to setup the subdirectory”. Which we don’t have any access.

Thanks,
Mr Client

The answer

Hello Mr Client,

Thanks for reaching out: I see a few scenarios :-)

Scenario #1: it works:

• www.starty123.com would point to your backend Shopify
• blog.starty123.com would point to your ghost site managed by FirePress. You would need to point your CNAME to something like starty123xmx9.firepress.link

Scenario #2: it works as well:

If we forget your Shopify requirement, you could have:

• www.starty123.com to point to your static site on FirePress
• www.starty123.com/blog would point to your ghost site managed by FirePress

Scenario #3: it does not work:

• www.aspenclean.com would point to your backend Shopify
• www.aspenclean.com/blog on FirePress would be impossible because Shopify will resolve this DNS request. It is just the way the web works, it's not a FirePress limitation.

See all DNS configuration options we offer:
https://firepress.org/en/how-can-i-configure-my-domain-or-dns-to-firepress-servers/

Cheers!
Pascal

Since our clients started to refer us, they have wondered if we can offer an official referral program. Well, you guessed it, the answer is yes and it's starting today!

In FirePress's spirit, where you own your data to build your home on the web, here is how we imagined our referral program.

There are two options to implement it:

• A) Blogger referral program
• B) Agency referral program

A) Blogger referral program

Here is the typical process:

1. You communicate & pitch to your audience that « they can start Ghost website like yours. They can sign-up for a free trial. »
2. Call-To-Action (CTA) — The CTA  link back to a form on your website! It could be at yoursite.com/ghost-hosting (it's your choice).
3. On your yoursite.com/ghost-hosting page, you will embed a trial form. FirePress will provide it.
4. When someone sign-up via the form, both of us will get an email notification.
5. FirePress will activate the trial as usual and take care of everything. Nothing to do for you.
6. After the trial period, if the person does not choose to continue with a paid plan, nothing happens. Boo :-/ But if the person pulls the trigger, it gets interesting.

It's all coming back to you!

Do you see the beauty of our referral program? It links back to you.

We think it's always the best strategy for you to link back to your website rather than driving traffic to someone else property. Almost every referral systems link back outside your website. But at FirePress, we feel it's the wrong way to do it.

Linking back to your website also has the advantage that you can monitor how many visitors viewed this page and have a clear idea of your funnel.

B) Agency referral program

The Membership affiliations are a more advanced setup. While this configuration is not mandatory, it's good to know it is available.

Once your referral program is running well and that we can observe you are seriously promoting it, we can level-up the process. Here is what I mean.

If needed, FirePress will provide you with a second DEDICATED GHOST INSTANCE for you to process the payments.

Here is the typical process:

1. You communicate & pitch to your audience that « they can start Ghost website like yours. They can sign-up for a free trial. »
2. Call-To-Action (CTA) — The CTA  link back to a form on your website! It could be at yoursite.com/ghost-hosting (it's your choice).
3. After the client made its payment, you will have to order a new site on FirePress's wholesale page.

It's the classic « you charge your client, and I charge you ». It makes the whole process entirely transparent and easy to manage for all parties. All this process is managed within the Ghost membership section. How beautiful!

Many advantages

• You get the credibility of running your own SaaS (software as a service) solution.
• You keep your relations with your clients.
• It reduces the administrative burden as both payments are managed automatically by the Ghost membership.
• You can now you can sell more than t-shirts and mugs!
• It creates a solid partnership between you and us.

Commissions

Let's talk about money for a moment:

• We will pay a 15% commission for every yearly plan activated via your site. That means 28$/year for LIFE, for each new client you bring in.
• We will pay a 10% commission for every monthly plan activated via your site. That means 1.90$/month for LIFE, for each new client you bring in.

Other considerations

• The commission will occur every six months.
• You will pay the bank's fees (from PayPal or Stripe).

Limitations

• The FirePress referral program is only available for FirePress's clients that are on a yearly plan. The client must have been a client for at least three months.
• If your website has no other purpose than driving a commission, we will refuse to set up a referral program.

Interested?

Contact us here.

We have a great search engine on FirePress. Use it, it's addictive!
Just click on the Google icon in the menu.

This post is for you if you are now at a point where contacting your clients using yourname@gmail.com doesn't feel right anymore. As you are building a website that will become your impresario, and you know you have to step up your game.

The good news is that you did that hard work already. You have a website running on Ghost or another platform.

The next step is to find where you will host your email. One obvious choice would be to go with Gmail Suite for businesses. This would cost you 6$/month per user.

So if you plan to use five emails accounts like:

• julia@greensweets.com
• mike@greensweets.com
• relations@greensweets.com
• billing@greensweets.com
• info@greensweets.com

you are already spending 30$/month or 360$/year for emails (and the overall Google app eco-system).

Alternative to Gmail

Gmail Suite is a great product, but there are cheaper alternatives to keep in mind.

At FirePress, we use Zoho Mail. They provide very a similar app eco-system as Google Suite but at an irresistible price. They offer a free email hosting solution, up to five users. Try to beat this!

Avoid this trap

Many hosting providers will try to sell you a crappy email hosting plan. I heard so many horror stories from every kind of businesses over the years.

This is the kind of system you want to avoid at all cost.

At FirePress, we will never try to sell you a suboptimal solution to make a quick buck.

Take action

You can set this up by yourself with some work. It's tricky, but Zoho's documentation is excellent.

If you are hosting your site with us at FirePress:

• You don't have to configure anything at the DNS level. Just remember that we manage your DNS for you. That's because you already forwarded the nameservers with us.
• We manage your DNS within Cloudflare for you
• The only thing you have to do, is to send us the five DNS values Zoho will tell you to update. This is how it looks like:

Configure your email clients

Once your DNS are set up, you will need to configure your email clients on your phones and computers.

Zoho have a nice App for your smartphone as well:

Let us do it

If you prefer, we can set it up for you. There is a one-time fee to do this task, as we will do a one-on-one consultation with you.

Happy email everyone!

In a case where something goes wrong with your Ghost's website or within our servers, you don't have anything to do. We include many services in your plan and backups are part of it.

Three ways to access your data

1) You can (and you should) export your data by using the export function within Ghost. This only export your data. Your pictures and your theme(s) are not part of this export. This feature is not available from the admin panel.

2) Owning your data, having a no lock-in mentality is at the core of what we do at FirePress. You can request your complete data generated with your Ghost site. See our fees here to do this action.

3) Enterprise requirements — If you would like to have a backup stored somewhere you own, we have a custom solution for you. You would need to open a Backblaze B2 account. They offer 10 GB of free storage. We will push full backups to your Backblaze account every 24 hours. The advantage of B2 is that you have access to a friendly GUI while we can push your backups via API. See our fees here to implement such a solution.

Yes, you can upgrade for the homepage plan whenever you want for a fee. You need to be aware that when you do upgrade, your URLs will need to be updated. The impacts are:

• Your existing links will break
• You will need to update your links within your site.

Find why below.

Example #1A) Ghost only

This is how your links look like:

• mysupersite.com/post-about-something/
• mysupersite.com/post-about-dog/
• mysupersite.com/cats-are-better-because/
• etc.

Example #1B) Ghost + a homepage

This is how your links look like:

• mysupersite.com/ (homepage)
• mysupersite.com/blog/post-about-something/
• mysupersite.com/blog/post-about-dog/
• mysupersite.com/blog/cats-are-better-because/
• etc...

Conclusion

Here, mysupersite.com/blog/ is the domain level where your Ghost site lives. mysupersite.com/ is where your homepage page lives. That's why we recommend thinking about this early in the process of building your website.

Here are a few tools that allow you to share files on your Ghost's website.

• https://www.getcloudapp.com/features
• https://jumpshare.com/
• https://www.dropbox.com/

You might be interested to embed an audio player from a mp3 file as well.