If using an official theme, you can update your theme by re-installing it from the Settings → Design area in Ghost Admin, to receive the latest version. Read more on this in our guide on updating official themes in Ghost.

If using a custom theme, you'll need to contact your theme developer to request an updated version that contains the proper code necessary to utilize the feature. You can refer your theme developer to our developer documentation which includes more information about how to implement support for this feature.

Change your Password

If you know your current password, you can log in to Ghost Admin, and go directly to the Settings → Staff area, and select your staff user profile.

To change your password, enter your old password, followed by entering your new password, and verifying.

When finished, click Change password.

Once updated, you will need to use the new password to login to Ghost Admin going forward.

Resetting your password

If you've forgotten your password, you can reset your password directly from the login area of Ghost Admin, e.g. by going to https://<subdomain>.ghost.io/ghost/ in your browser.

To reset your password, enter your staff user email address and click Forgot?

Clicking Forgot? will trigger a password reset email to your inbox, that contains a link that must be clicked in order to reset the password.

Once reset, you can login to Ghost Admin with your email address and new password.

Login from Ghost.org

Go to https://account.ghost.org/signin/, or click Sign in from https://ghost.org, and enter your site address.

Login from your site

You can also log in directly from your publication, by appending /ghost to the end of your site URL.

For example, you can login by going to yourdomain.com/ghost, OR, you can also use your ghost.io site address, subdomain.ghost.io/ghost. Either method will take you directly to your site's login page so that login credentials can be entered for access.

If you have secondary domains (e.g. yourotherdomain.com) that you would like to use with your publication, you will need to make provision for forwarding these requests to your Ghost site. This work takes place outside of Ghost(Pro) and you'll need to speak to your domain provider to find out the best way to achieve this.

To create a form, go to the Settings → Membership area in Ghost Admin. From there, click Embed next to the Embeddable signup form option:

You can choose to create a branded form that includes your logo, as well as custom colors, or you can use a minimal layout if you prefer–each layout includes configurable options to make it your own.

When you've finished customizing your signup form, you can copy the embed code for use anywhere on the web.

Run the migration

The Substack migrator allows you to quickly import content and members from your Substack to your Ghost publication. You can access the migrator tool from the Settings → Labs area of Ghost Admin.

It's helpful to log in to your Substack account before running the migration in Ghost Admin.

1. Enter your Substack URL

To start the migration process, enter the public URL to your Substack, and click Get started.

2. Export content

Next, click Open Substack Exporter. If already logged into Substack, this will take you directly to the location of your Substack account where an export can be generated.  

Click Create new export, and then download the zip file that's generated after the export is completed in Substack.

2. Upload content

Once your export has been downloaded, return to the migrator window in Ghost Admin, and select Choose file, and navigate to the zip file you downloaded from Substack, once uploaded click Continue.

If you're unsure of where the file was saved, check your Downloads folder.

3. Export subscribers

Next, it's time to import your Substack subscribers. Click Download subscribers from Substack, to trigger a CSV file download of your subscriber list.

Once downloaded, select Choose file and navigate to the CSV download, and click Continue.

4. Review

Ghost will confirm the number of posts and members that will be imported to your publication. If satisfied, click Start migration to begin the import of your data.

After a few moments, you'll see a confirmation message, confirming that your data was successfully migrated to your Ghost site.

Substack fees

Ghost does not take a cut of your revenue. Substack will continue to take 10% fees on your existing paid subscriptions. If you would like help getting payment fees removed, contact concierge@ghost.org.

If you encounter issues, and you're a Ghost(Pro) customer, reach out to our support team for further advice, or head to the forum for community support if you're self-hosting.

Ghost comes with several features out of the box that helps improve your website's search engine optimization, including:

• Automatic and custom metadata — Each post or page on a Ghost website has its own metadata. If you leave the metadata blank, Ghost automatically uses the data available as a fallback.
• Social media integration — Built-in functionality for adding social media metadata to your site including Twitter Cards and Open Graph tags for Facebook.
• XML sitemaps — Ghost automatically creates and updates an XML sitemap for your website to help search engines understand the structure of your site and find all of its content.
• Canonical tags — Ghost adds canonical tags across your site to tell search engines which version of a page they should consider the "official" one. This helps prevent problems with duplicate content.
• Structured data — Ghost automatically includes structured data in all posts and pages. This helps search engines understand the content and context of your pages, which can improve how your site appears in search results.
• Site performance — Ghost is powered by a modern technology stack and themes have clean semantic markup. This means it performs very well. Independent tests have found Ghost to be up to 1,900% faster than WordPress.

A baseline Ghost publication performs very well in site performance audits. Providing you use a well-designed theme, and keep the number of external scripts and large files to a minimum, you’ll benefit from great site speeds.

Custom metadata

If you haven't already done so during site setup, make sure to update your site meta settings in Settings → General, where you can add custom metadata content for the homepage of your site for search engines and social media.

It's also possible to add custom metadata and social media metadata to each post or page from the post settings menu.

As you begin to enter your metadata, Ghost will show you a handy preview so that you can make sure it looks good.

If you leave this information blank, Ghost automatically uses data available from the content on the page as a fallback. Search engine algorithms may still choose to display alternative metadata than what you provide.

Google Search console

Search Console is a free service that you can use to submit sitemaps, and check your indexing status, as well as find out what search impressions and clicks you are getting from Google.

To add your site as a property in Search Console, follow this guide:

Official Ghost + Search Console Integration

Keep on top of your site’s SEO performance by integrating Ghost with Google Search Console to monitor indexed pages, search impressions, clicks and more!

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform

Further reading

A beginners guide to SEO for publishers and creators!

You don’t need to be a marketing expert to get started with SEO. Here’s how!

Ghost ResourcesKym Ellis

How to leverage SEO for a membership website

Search engine optimization can work for membership business and newsletters too — here’s how.

Ghost ResourcesKym Ellis

While it's not possible to avoid these problems completely, Ghost offers some helpful features to help you stay on top of things when it comes to maximizing your email deliverability.

Automatic list cleaning

Ghost helps keep your email list clean and deliverability rates high with automatic list cleaning. If emails sent to a member consistently fail, or are marked as spam, emails for that account will be disabled.

In the event that emails are mistakenly disabled for a member, they can easily re-enable them directly in their account settings.

Staff users in Ghost can also view and manage disabled emails from Ghost admin.

Troubleshooting tips in member accounts

The member account area is populated with dynamically customized tips and suggestions for anyone who's having trouble receiving emails.

This information is at the fingertips of each of your subscribers, so they understand how to get to the bottom of any issues. Read more troubleshooting tips if your members are reporting that they aren't receiving your emails.

Beyond what Ghost does for you to provide a helping hand, there are a number of things you can do to ensure your content lands in the right place — the inbox.

Here are some tips about spam and promotions folders to help you manage your email newsletters for the best possible deliverability.

Spam prevention

No matter how great your deliverability game is, its always possible that a small percentage of emails may end up being marked as spam. This depends on many factors, such as the sending reputation of your from address, the email provider of the recipient (Hotmail and Outlook are notorious for poor spam handling), and the content of your email.

If you want to be proactive, there are some things you can do that may have a positive impact on your delivery rates:

• Run your email newsletter content through a spam checker, to identify language that can trigger spam filters.
• Encourage your members to add your address as a safe sender, or even better, encourage them to reply to your emails.
• Keep your free subscriber list tidy by periodically removing inactive subscribers.

The members dashboard allows you to filter your member list and find out who the most and least active subscribers are using filtering, and also allows you to unsubscribe multiple members from email at once using bulk actions.

Promotions folders

Some email clients such as Gmail deliver your newsletters to tabbed inboxes based on their own algorithms that consider everything including the content of the email, subscriber engagement and sender information.

It is expected that some of your newsletters will be placed in the promotions tab by Gmail. While there are no proven methods to control the placement of your emails, you can use the tips in this article to support your members, and increase the chances of your emails landing in the Primary tab.

Gmail tabbed inboxes

Gmail introduced tabbed inboxes to improve deliverability, increase open rates and reduce spam complaints, by giving users the ability to understand the nature of the emails in their inbox at a glance. If your newsletter ends up in the promotions folder, it's not deemed as Spam, and studies have shown that Gmail users actually do use the tabbed folders.

Plus — this doesn't apply to all Gmail users, since many people turn the tabbed inbox feature off within their account.

Sending emails to the Primary tab

Although there is no way to guarantee all emails will end up in the promotions tab, these tips can help maximise your email delivery if your members email you about your newsletters landing in the Promotions tab.

1. Ask your member to add your newsletter from address to their contacts. This will increase the chances of your newsletters appearing in the inbox.

2. Ask your member to move any emails that appeared in promotions to their inbox. This sends a signal to Gmail that the recipient wants to receive these emails in their inbox.

3. Use a free spam checker tool like this one to check your email content before hitting send. The content of your email plays a huge role in how any email client (not just Gmail) decides to filter your emails. You can use tools like this to prevent newsletters from being flagged as spam.

Further reading

Email sender name best practices for newsletters

Find out how to set the best sender name for your newsletter and increase your open rates.

Ghost ResourcesKym Ellis

Email deliverability explained for publishers

Find out why DMARC is not necessarily the answer to your delivery problems.

Ghost ResourcesKym Ellis

Tags can quickly be added from the Post settings menu, with a menu to select existing tags, or you can add new tags from here.

Managing tags

Navigate to the Tags page from the sidebar of Ghost Admin to find a full list of your tags. Here you can see how many posts are assigned to each tag, and click into each tag to edit its settings.

Each tag has some basic settings and meta data associated with it. It's recommended to fill out all relevant information for each tag on your site, to improve the user experience for your visitors, and populate rich structured data for the search engines.

Tag collections

Ghost automatically places tagged posts into a tag collection — a designated feed of content that has its own URL.

For example, you may tag some content with "News" and other content with "Podcast," which would create two tag collections automatically:

• yoursite.com/tag/news
• yoursite.com/tag/podcast

If you tag a post with both News and Podcast — the post appears in both tag collections.

Tag collections are dedicated content collections for each category of content that you have. They have their own pages, their own RSS feeds and can support their own cover images and meta data.

Primary tags

The first tag in the list is always given the most importance, and some themes will only display the primary tag (the first tag in the list) by default. Tags can be re-ordered from the post settings menu. In this example, "News" is the primary tag:

News, Technology, Startup

Internal tags

Internal tags use a hashtag and can be used for special styling that is presented in a theme or to help filter and organize content internally.

For example, if you sometimes publish posts with video content - you might want your theme to adapt and get rid of the sidebar for these posts, to give more space for an embedded video to fill the screen.

News, #video

Here, the theme would assign the post to the publicly displayed tag of News, but it would also keep a private record of the post being tagged with #video, which can then be used to apply special styling via your theme.

Content management

There are several filtering options in Ghost Admin that allow you to quickly filter and search for content. These filters can be used to:

• Quickly filter all draft content, published content or featured posts
• Filter posts by access level
• Filter posts by author
• Filter posts by tag (read more about Tags in Ghost)

Filtering makes organizing and updating content easy. If you have a filtered view that you need to access quickly and often, created a Saved view:

Bulk actions on posts

If you need to edit multiple posts at once, use the bulk editing feature to select multiple posts.

To make bulk actions, select the posts you'd like to edit by holding shift, cmd or ctrl and clicking to select which posts you'd like to update, then right-click to open the bulk edit menu.

From here you can perform actions such as adding tags, changing post access, adding, removing the featured status, or unpublishing multiple posts at once.

You can also quickly duplicate a post, by right-clicking on any post and selecting Duplicate from the menu. All of the content, images and other embeds, as well as settings will be copied into a brand-new post.

Once enabled, your first newsletter will appear. Click Customize to configure your newsletters settings.

Name & description

Setting a custom name and description for your newsletter makes it easier to identify inside Ghost. You can also choose to display the newsletter name within your email templates.

Email addresses

Set a custom sender name, ‘from’ email address, and ‘reply-to’ email address for your newsletter — read more on choosing a good custom sender name.

• Sender Email Address
  This is the email address your newsletters will come from when your newsletter lands in the inboxes of your members. By default, this is configured as a noreply email address.
• Reply-to Email Address
  This email address is used for replies to your email newsletter when your members reply directly from any newsletter they received.

If you'd like to change the Sender or Reply-to email addresses, enter the new email address to be used and click Save. This sends a confirmation email to the new email address, containing a link that must be clicked to verify and activate the email address.

Member settings

Enable or disable whether or not your newsletter should be automatically applied to new member signups to your publication. When enabled, members will automatically be subscribed to this newsletter.

Using multiple newsletters

Ghost allows you to create more than one newsletter, each with its own subscriptions, settings and template design. This means you can give your audience the option of what email content they'd like to subscribe to.

Here are a few examples of how you might use multiple newsletters:

• If you cover different topics in your content, your audience can decide which topics they’re most interested in.
• If you send daily newsletters and weekly roundups, your audience can decide when they’d like to hear from you.
• Give your audience the chance to subscribe to your newsletter and your podcast episode reminders, or just one.

Add a newsletter

To add an additional newsletter, click + Add newsletter

Each newsletter can have its own name and description, and Members can also automatically be opted-in (or out) to receive newsletters you create.

Once created, you’ll have additional options to customize your email newsletter design, and your newsletter will appear within Portal when new members signup, as well as when existing members manage their account preferences.

Archive a newsletter

Archiving newsletters allows you to make any newsletter you create unavailable to members.

Once archived, the newsletter will also be unavailable as an option when publishing new posts.

Once your emails are setup with the correct names and settings, it's time to set your email template design.

To add an announcement to your publication, go to Settings → Announcement bar. Here you can add your announcement copy, pick a background color, and select the visibility of your announcement:

The visibility options allow you to show the announcement bar to logged out visitors, free members, and paid members — or a combination of the three. For example, this means you can share breaking news with every visitor of your site, share special offers with only new visitors and free members, or invite paid members to an exclusive community.

Announcements can be removed at any time by either removing the message or toggling off visibility for everyone in your settings and hitting Save.

Publication info

The Settings → General menu has a space for you to add information about your site that will show up in your theme, in the search engines, or on social media.

• Title & description — Set a name and description to be used in the theme of your site and to help people identify your site around the web.
• Site timezone — Set the timezone you want to use for scheduling and publishing posts.
• Publication language — Set a language to automatically tell the search engines what language your content is in.

Site meta data

In the meta settings, you can add some custom metadata content for the search engines, as well as customize social media cards, and connect Facebook and Twitter accounts for richer card support.

Advanced settings

If your new publication is not yet ready for prime time, you can use private site mode with a shared password. When private site mode is on, all search engine optimization features are switched off to keep your site under the radar.

This is not secure authentication. You shouldn't rely on this feature for protecting important private data. It's just a simple, shared password for some very basic privacy.

Rich editing at your fingertips

Using the contextual toolbar allows you to efficiently format your text, and add links, quotes, or headings.

Using the dynamic menu

Use the card menu to add images, HTML, embeds, bookmarks, email-only content, and more to your posts. You can insert a card either by clicking the  +  button, or typing  / on a new line to search for a particular card.

Learn more about all of the available cards in the editor.