By now you may have realised that WordPress is an all in one solution if you want a website for your business or for personal use. You can easily use WordPress for a static brochure style website, as a stand alone blog or a combination of both. But what if you already have a custom built website and you want to incorporate WordPress into that website? Will you have to change your whole website over to WordPress or is there a different way of going about things? That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today! Get ready to learn how to integrate WordPress into your website.
If you already have a website in place, there’s no sense in taking it completely down and installing WordPress instead. It’s not that it can’t be done but your website that’s currently in place may already have some optimization in place that has it ranking well in the search engines. It’d also be a waste of time and money if you had a custom built website made, only to tear it down in the end. What you can do however is integrate WordPress in your existing website and you can do this a couple of different ways.
The first way of integrating WordPress into your website is to create a sub-domain. You’d need to go into your hosting account and set up a sub-domain. Each host has this set up a little bit differently so you’ll want to follow their documentation on how you should go about doing this step. It’s generally pretty simple and should only take a minute or less. If your web hosting company offers a 1 click install of WordPress, your next step would be to select the 1 click install and choose the sub-domain that you created for the place that you want the WordPress installation to go. If your web hosting provider doesn’t have a 1 click for WordPress, you’ll have to download the current version of WordPress from WordPress.org and upload the files to the sub-domain directly per WordPress’s instructions.
Skipping back a step for a moment, if you’re wondering what to name your sub-domain, most people simply go with blog.mywebsite.com. “Blog” would be the sub-domain and “mywebsite.com” would be your regular domain name/website address. Now here’s where it gets a little tricky. Installing WordPress on a sub-domain is simple but the design isn’t going to be the same as the rest of your website. Due to this, you’re going to have to have your website designer code in your header area, footer area and any other website elements that you want to appear or you’re going to have to code them in yourself.
The other method of integrating WordPress into your website is to create a new directory for your website such as mywebsite.com/blog. “Blog” would be your new directory and it’s where WordPress would need to be installed. Once again, even if you’re going about things in this manner, the design would still need to be changed to match your existing website. If you’re not sure how to do this, WordPress.org has some great documentation that’ll help you or your designer complete the process. As far as the integration is concerned though, as you can now tell, it’s not very complicated and it only takes a few minutes. Now you can have WordPress on your existing website without having to give up your current website all together.