June & July 2025 Update on Magic Pages

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
3 min read

I guess 2-monthly updates are becoming the norm now. In the end of June, I was so busy, that I forgot to write one again – and only realised in mid July. Well, let's look at what happened at Magic Pages in June and July.

🧩 Custom Theme Add-On

It started as a soft-launched, not-announced test – and then many of you signed up for it: the new custom theme add-on for the Starter plan.

Many of you shared the same feedback with me over the last few months: the price hike from Starter to Pro is too much, when all you want is custom theme access, and do not care about the additional feature of the Pro plan.

For $2.50 per month, $25.00 per year, or $75.00 in the Starter lifetime plan, you can get access to custom themes now. More on this here:

Custom Theme Add-On for Starter Plans
One of the most common pieces of feedback I’ve received from Starter plan customers has been about theme restrictions. While the Pro plan includes full custom theme support, many publishers on the Starter plan wanted the flexibility to upload their own themes without upgrading to the full Pro plan. Many

📨 Email Forwarding

You know what really sucks? Sending a newsletter from hello@yourdomain.com – and not being able to receive replies.

This has happened to a Magic Pages customer. One subscriber reached out on social media, after replying to their newsletter for months and not hearing back. Oooff.

Ghost sends newsletters through Mailgun, a dedicated bulk email service. That is different than email hosting though. With normal email hosting, for example from Namecheap, GoDaddy, or Google Workspace, you can send and receive emails on your custom domain. With an email sending service like Mailgun, you can only send them.

But, Mailgun has a nifty feature: email forwarding. If somebody replies to your email newsletter sent through Magic Pages, you can now have that reply forwarded to an email address that you actually control. Learn more here:

Email Forwarding for Newsletter Domains
Every now and then, I am asked how incoming emails on Magic Pages are handled. As in, how does Magic Pages or Ghost handle somebody replying to your newsletter? The answer so far: it doesn’t. Magic Pages is a managed Ghost CMS hosting provider – not an email hosting service. Well,

🏎️ Faster Websites thanks to Redis

All Magic Pages websites have been upgraded to use Ghost's built-in Redis caching. This basically just means: things are faster!

I have written in detail about this, based on the website on a dear Magic Pages customer, CarExplore:

How CarExplore Achieved 70% Faster Page Loads with Ghost’s Built-in Redis Caching
💡TL;DR: I reduced Ghost database queries from 600ms to 150ms using a Redis sidecar architecture. A full Docker Compose config is included, so you can deploy the same. When CarExplore.com.au’s database queries started taking 600ms, I knew something was wrong. This automotive site with 1,600+ articles

👀 Ghost 6

Apart form these improvements, I have been working hard on getting things ready for Ghost 6. The first alpha versions and release candidates have been released on Github a few weeks ago, and I have used these to make sure everything's ready here at Magic Pages.

When Ghost 6 drops, you'll be one of the first to experience it, here at Magic Pages.

🔮 What's Next?

In the background, I am working on a completely new customer portal. This will be the base for some infrastructure changes at Magic Pages. The customer portal will improve backend communication, as well as navigation and authentication for you in the frontend.


As always, I'm just a chat message away if you have questions, feedback, or just want to say hello.

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki

About Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki

I'm the founder of Magic Pages, providing managed Ghost hosting that makes it easy to focus on your content instead of technical details.

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