Will My Open Rates Drop After Migrating to Magic Pages?

Most migrations don't come with a drop in open rates. What moves the number is the domain your newsletters are sent from, and that's the one part worth paying attention to.

After the migration, your newsletters go out through our Mailgun setup instead of your old host's. Your readers never see that. Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook do, but only in one respect. They judge the domain your email is sent from, and how much good sending history that domain has behind it.

So the whole question comes down to one decision.

Keep the domain you already send from

If your newsletter goes out from mail.yourdomain.com today, set up that same domain here. Providers see a sender they already trust, your history stays attached to it, and there is nothing to rebuild. It costs you a couple of DNS records during setup, and we have an article that walks through it:

This is the single most useful thing you can do before your first send with us. Every time you change sending domains, you start building trust from zero – that's true on any host, not just ours.

If you skip the setup, your newsletters go out from your site's mymagic.page address instead. That works, and it needs no DNS at all. But it's a domain we share across sites, so your newsletters carry its reputation rather than the one you've spent years building. If you already send from your own domain, bring it.

If there is a dip, it's short

On a genuinely new sending domain, expect slightly lower open rates for the first few days. That's providers deciding whether to trust a sender they haven't seen before, and it resolves on its own with consistent sending. Most publications are back to normal within two or three newsletters. Warming Up A New Sending Domain explains what's happening underneath.

You can help it along by asking your readers to. If your first newsletter lands somewhere other than the inbox, they can mark it as "Not Spam" and add your sender address to their contacts. Both are real positive signals, and asking for them after a move is a completely normal thing for a publisher to do.

Set your sender address before the first send

Two things are worth checking in Ghost under Settings → Newsletters, before you send to your whole list.

Your sender email address. If you're sending from noreply@, this is a good moment to change it to something a reader could write back to: hello@, mail@ or newsletter@yourdomain.com. Replies are one of the strongest positive signals a provider can see, and a no-reply address guarantees you never get one.

Authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC prove your emails really come from you. The sending domain setup in the customer portal gives you the exact records to add, and checks them for you once they're in. On a fresh domain, start your DMARC policy at p=none for the first few weeks so everything can settle, then move to p=quarantine once sends are stable.

One more thing worth knowing: if you embed a third-party <script> tag in your emails, some spam filters take a dim view of it. Email clients ignore it either way, so nothing breaks visually and it's easy to miss.

The number itself is an estimate

An open rate has never been an exact headcount. It's based on whether a small tracking pixel loads in each email, and that pixel is unreliable in both directions. It fires when nobody read the email, because Apple Mail loads it automatically for a large share of subscribers. And it fails to fire when somebody did, because their app blocks images.

Platforms also calculate and present it differently. So when you compare your old platform's number to the one Ghost shows you, treat the comparison loosely. They're possibly not measuring the same thing.

Your list comes with you, dead addresses included

Not every address on a list stays in use, and there are two kinds.

Some are genuinely dead: the mailbox no longer exists, so the email bounces. Ghost handles that group for you. When an address permanently bounces or someone marks you as spam, it stops sending to that address automatically, so they drop off over time without you doing anything.

The trickier group is the addresses that still work but that nobody checks anymore. Someone moved on and never unsubscribed. These never bounce, so they stay on your list and quietly hold your open rate down. If your open rate was already sliding before you started thinking about moving, this is usually why.

That's the group worth clearing out yourself, and it's easiest to do right before a migration rather than after. In your members list, add a filter for Emails opened (all time) is 0, combined with Emails sent (all time) is greater than 0. That surfaces everyone who has received your newsletters and never opened one. From there, click the three dots next to the filter icon and unsubscribe all the inactive members.

If you want to see what's happening with delivery after you move, send us the domain you're sending from and we'll pull the bounce rates, spam complaints and delivery stats from Mailgun for you.