Dawn, the gorgeous Ghost theme that helps night-time readers engage
If I didn’t use Medium, I’d use Ghost. And Dawn is such a winning theme if it wasn’t open-source I’d happily pay. With beautifully page-turning, easy navigation flows that fit elements into an almost flawless markup validation, Dawn from the Ghost Foundation must be one of the best thought out blog themes I’ve ever seen. You can download Dawn on Github. Free.
If you’re an independent freelancer like me (from either a technical or literary background) Dawn’s simple and clean user interface will present all your page content from images and graphs to tables and dry blocks of text in an engaging light. Writing on Ghost feels like you’re presenting stories not blog posts, and Dawn visually enhances the Ghost framework to help you build a community of active readers.
Lift up the hood on this impressive theme and the stats are music to the ear. I’ve been testing Dawn on and off since early-2021 and Dawn’s web performance is consistently reliable; the Desktop version checks most if not all of the boxes on Google PageSpeed.
Without cache or a CDN configured, Dawn appears to load an average of 20–30 requests in pages weighing around ~1MB in under half a second. That’s as good as (if not better than) all top WordPress theme authors.
GTMetrix puts Dawns fully-loaded time at just over 1 second on Chrome testing from Vancouver. Dawn’s excellent results speak for themselves.
