Build a Blazing Fast Blog with Ghost, Netlify and Tailwind CSS

Mar. 16, 2020 · 2 min read

Building the latest version of Kineda's blog, I had a few goals in mind:

Open source CMS with a focus on writing

Ease of design, developments and updates

Blazing fast site loading speed

Ghost 3.0 vs. WordPress

Ghost met the first criteria with its simple and intuitive blogging interface. After writing, designing and developing on WordPress for over 15 years, it's been a pleasant experience to be able use a dashboard that's uncluttered and puts writing first. Ghost's editor is clean and minimal with SEO features are built-in natively. I'm happy to say goodbye to Wordpress's plugin bloat, unused dashboard menu options and a platform that's clearly moved away from its initial blogging roots.

Tailwind CSS

Designing this latest version of Kineda has been a breeze thanks to a combination of Ghost's support of Markdown and Tailwind CSS. If you haven't tried Tailwind yet, you should. The utility first CSS framework is a developer's dream. The classes are extremely intuitive and cuts down the amount of time trying to build your own classes and styles. We're talking at least a 2-3X increase in development speed. Forget Bootstrap and give Tailwind a try. You won't regret it. If you're worried about Tailwind's file size, there's a great tutorial on how to use PurgeCSS to remove any unused CSS, and get your stylesheet primed for production.

Netlify

After combining Ghost + Tailwind together with hosting on Netlify, this blog is blazing fast. Netlify’s all-in-one platform for modern web projects is perfect with it's ADN technology. They provide continuous deployment services, global CDN, ultra-fast DNS, atomic deploys, instant cache invalidation, one-click SSL, a browser-based interface, a CLI, and many other features for managing your site. How fast?

Google PageSpeed Insights - Perfect 100 Score

Here's the results after running the site through Google's Pagespeed Insights test: 99 on mobile and 100 on desktop. As everything moves towards mobile, loading speed becomes increasingly important. Trying to accomplish the same through WordPress would've required some pretty heavy caching and server tweaks.

Ghost, Tailwind and Netlify make a beautiful blogging and development combination. If you give it a try, we'd love to hear your experience!