Installing WP before primary domain is ready

  • I hope this is the right place to post this question.

    We will be launching a website in the next few months but want to get our blog running now to begin adding content to it. Is it technically possible to install the WP blog somewhere other than where our website will ultimately be hosted, but still have the content that we add to our blog benefit our main site in terms of search engine rankings.

    So I guess what I’m asking is can our website be hosted in one place (www.webaddress.com) with the blog be hosted somewhere else, but still have the blog be somehow under the main site domain (like https://www.webaddress.com/blog/) so that the frequently updated content of the blog benefits the entire domain’s s.e. placement?

    Obviously I don’t know enough about the web to know if a subdirectory of a domain must physically reside on the same server. I’m guessing so, but thought I’d ask. If I can’t do this, then is it easy enough to move the entire blog later once our site is up and running?

    Thanks so much in advance.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Realistically, your sub directories have to be on the same web server as the root. You could have a sub directory redirect somewhere else, like if someone goes to webaddress.com/blog, it redirects to adifferentwebaddress.com, but this isn’t probably very useful for what you want to do.

    So you are going to start the blog, but don’t have the domain or hosting ready yet to host it in it’s final, live location?

    Is the WordPress install always going to be at webaddress.com/blog, with webaddress.com having some static HTML pages or something else? Or are you going to build it at webaddress.com/blog and move it to webaddress.com when it’s ready?

    If you have your domain and hosting, but the main site just isn’t ready yet, I’d recommend trying to build your blog in place at webaddress.com/blog, even if webaddress.com is just a coming soon, or a nothing at all.

    But if that domain or hosting isn’t ready yet, building it at anotherwebaddress.com/blog and moving it to webaddress.com/blog when you want it to be live is plenty doable, here is the documentation for moving WordPress.

    I wouldn’t mess with the SEO until you have WordPress where you want it permanently, it will just be a headache and probably not help. In fact, when you install WordPress, you can choose to make it private so that search engines don’t index it. I would do this until the site is ready, so you don’t have a bunch of half-finished pages and broken links in Google when you move the site.

    Thread Starter successcoaching

    (@successcoaching)

    Thank jleuze. The reason for considering hosting it elsewhere is not so much that the primary domain isn’t live…I could throw up a static page for that. My web guys told me it has more to do with the environment on the server. It’s obviously technically doable, but based on their scheduling and project prioritization, they didn’t plan on having to get the right support apps (whatever stuff you need to run wordpress…php? mysql?…) to be able to install and run WP until a while later (8 weeks or so).

    I could just wait but I’m chomping at the bit to get the blog started…because I know that by the time the site is live, I’ll be buried with other stuff related to birthing our product. And then setting up the blog will be but one thing in a giant list of stuff to do.

    I might just start with generating offline content now and just have a small store of it to dole out over time. I could get a little ahead that way.

    Thanks for the clarification.

    Ohhhh, yeah I run into issues like that all the time, people trying to run WordPress on an old fashioned Windows server or something…

    But yeah, you can definitely just install WordPress on another server so that you can get your site prepared, and then move it when the other server is ready.

    If you don’t have somewhere to host it while you work on it, you could always install WordPress on your own computer. Plenty of people develop that way, but it is a little more tedious to set up.

    You need a LAMP, MAMP, or WAMP stack depending on your OS, the documentation has a bunch of link on Installing WordPress on your own Computer.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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