Migrate from Ghost

A five-step walkthrough for moving a Ghost publication to Project Broadsheet. Covers the JSON export, HTML-to-Markdown conversion, image rehosting, and URL preservation.

Moving from Ghost to Project Broadsheet is a matter of converting each post's body from HTML to Markdown, wrapping it with the appropriate front matter, and preserving URLs through a redirect map. The process is mechanical and scriptable — below is the path most publishers follow.

Step 1 — Export from Ghost

In the Ghost admin, open Settings → Labs → Export your content. Ghost downloads a single JSON file containing every post, page, tag, author, and piece of metadata in the site.

Step 2 — Convert HTML to Markdown

The JSON contains each post's body as HTML. Use a conversion tool such as turndown to translate each body into Markdown, then wrap each post in Project Broadsheet's front matter format:

---
title: "Post title"
description: "Excerpt or summary"
author: slugged-author
date: 2024-06-15
section: news
tags: [tag1, tag2]
---

Step 3 — Place files in the correct sections

Project Broadsheet reads articles from src/content/{section}/. Organize the converted posts by their target section:

src/content/news/my-post.md
src/content/opinion/another-post.md

The folder name must match the section field in the post's front matter.

Step 4 — Rehost images

Ghost stores images at /content/images/…. Download each referenced image, place the files under src/assets/img/migrated/, and update the image paths in the Markdown. Relative paths keep the archive portable for future migrations.

Step 5 — Preserve URLs with redirects

Ghost URLs are flat: /post-slug/. Project Broadsheet URLs are section-scoped: /section/post-slug/. To preserve SEO value and avoid breaking external links, add a _redirects file when deploying to Cloudflare Pages:

/post-slug /news/post-slug/ 301

Generate one line per old URL from the Ghost export's slug list.

Would you rather hand this off?

I offer a migration service that handles the full process — automated conversion, image rehosting, a complete redirect map, and a quality-control pass on a sample of the archive. Tiered pricing starts at $499 for up to 50 articles.

Request a migration quote and I'll reply personally within a business day.