How to Migrate from Plausible to Ghostboard
Step-by-step guide to migrate from Plausible to Ghostboard. Export, import, and keep your all-time analytics without losing data.
If you run a blog on Ghost and you use Plausible for analytics, you might be wondering: What if I switch to Ghostboard? How do I preserve my historical data? Will I still see my monthly & all-time stats? Will it hurt my insight into growth?
In this post, I’ll walk you step-by-step through:
- How to export your data from Plausible
- How to import it into Ghostboard
- What benefits Ghostboard brings
This is for bloggers who want clarity, privacy, and useful metrics that help grow their audience. By the way, Ghostboard has unlimited data retention.
Why Consider Ghostboard Instead of Plausible?
Before diving into the technical steps, let’s compare what Ghostboard offers, especially in contrast with Plausible, from a Ghost-blogger’s standpoint.
| Feature / Benefit | Plausible Analytics | Ghostboard |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | General-purpose website analytics | Built specifically for Ghost blogs |
| Metrics | Page views, visitors, bounce rate, referrers | Tailored blog insights: subscribers, top posts, reading time |
| Ease of Use | Minimalist dashboard, but generic | Optimized UI for bloggers, actionable blog data |
| Content Performance | Basic traffic metrics | Deep post-level insights (reads vs. views, engagement) |
| Click Tracking | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| SEO Report | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Broken Links Detection | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Privacy & GDPR | Strong GDPR compliance, cookieless tracking | ✅ Same |
| Pricing | Pricing based on pageviews | ✅ Unlimited pageviews |
| Data Detention | 3-5+ years (depending on the plan) | ✅ Unlimited data retention |
| Best For | General websites, startups, SaaS | ✅ Bloggers and publishers using Ghost |
How to Export Data from Plausible
To bring your data into Ghostboard, you need to extract the historical stats from Plausible. Here’s how:
- Log in to your Plausible dashboard.
- Go to Site Settings for the site whose analytics you want to export.
- Select the "All time" option in the time period selector:
- With the Months option selected at the right, click the Download icon:
How to Import Into Ghostboard
Once you have the Plausible Export ZIP, here’s how to import it to Ghostboard.
- Log in to Ghostboard.
- Navigate to the Sync section in your Ghostboard dashboard.
- Look for Import from Plausible at the bottom. This may be labelled “Analytics Import from Plausible”
- Upload the ZIP file you downloaded from Plausible. You don't need to take any further action.
- Confirm the import and let Ghostboard process the data. Depending on volume, this might take a few minutes.
- Once done, verify in Ghostboard that:
- Monthly and all-time data is present. You should see your older months, aggregated into “all time” as well as per-month views.
- Key metrics like total visitors, total pageviews, posts with the highest traffic, etc.
- Comparisons: check current month vs same month last year (if applicable), or trends month to month, to ensure data loaded correctly.
- If you see any missing data or formatting issues (dates off, values zeroed where they shouldn’t), double-check the CSV format, timezone, and that no rows got truncated or misnamed. Contact us if you notice an issue.
Key Benefits After Migration
Here are the advantages you’ll typically get by switching from Plausible to Ghostboard (or adding Ghostboard as your primary Ghost-integrated analytics) while importing existing data.
- Unified content + analytics view: ghost-centric metrics (authors, post count, content length, scroll, clicks, etc.) alongside traffic metrics.
- Better growth insights: easy to spot which posts are gaining over time, what content type resonates and boost your SEO.
- Monthly & all-time blended view: you keep your older data and see long trends without starting from zero.
- Simplified dashboard for Ghost users: less context switching, less external tools.
- Motivation & transparency: seeing how you’ve grown over months or years can help motivate content consistency.
Conclusion
Migrating from Plausible to Ghostboard is totally doable — and highly beneficial if you want a system more attuned to blogging, with historical perspective and better content-centred metrics.
By exporting your data from Plausible and importing via Ghostboard, you avoid losing momentum, keep your “all-time” data, and gain insights more directly aligned with your writing and audience growth.
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