WP Engine Hosting Issue for an Updated Blogsite using CPanel

Hello,

I’m here to help. But I’ve read your post a couple of times, and I really don’t understand the problem you’re trying to solve. As English is not my first language, I even left your question open so others could answer… but the fact that the question has been unanswered after more than 21 hours means I’m not the only one struggling to understand your issue.

Recently, we worked with an external agency to update our blog theme & as we didn’t want any changes to be made to our main website, the agency said that we could do it easily by separating the subdirectory.

It’s not clear what the “agency” says you can do easily. Update the theme easily? And what do they even mean by “separating the subdirectory”?

Unfortunately, quite late in the project lifecycle, we realized that our existing WP Engine is not compatible with the CPanel instance that the team had been working on to update our blogsite.

What exactly is not compatible between WPEngine and cPanel? What are you trying to accomplish that you’re unable to do? Have you reached out to WPEngine support to explain what you’re trying to accomplish (the end-result you desire, not the process you have assumed) and they told you that’s not possible?

I don’t really come from a technical background & my WP knowledge is quite limited. So, I was hoping any experts who could second this MO or suggest a better alternative.

I’m more than happy to help, but only if I can understand the problem you’re trying to solve.

I’m not too familiar with the WPEngine hosting platform, but a quick googling shows WPEngine supports 1-click stagingng. This means your “agency” could:

1. Make a copy of your existing website from your WPEngine dashboard with a single click
2. Make all the changes they want to make to the copyied website in the “staging” environment without affecting the live website at all
3. Once they’re done with the re-design, with another 1-click, they can turn the copy they’ve worked on into the LIVE site

This seems to be a standard process for any website re-design project, and I’m struggling to understand where the subdirectory, cPanel and running two separate instances of WordPress come into the picture.

Hello George,

Thanks for responding!

Let me reiterate the issue to make it a little clearer.

We were planning to update the look-and-feel of our website but not for all the pages. We wanted to keep our product pages the way they are right now and apply a new theme to just the pages under /blogs.

To get this done, we hired an agency as we did not have the technical expertise to get it done inhouse. The agency assessed our project and said that it would be possible to use two different themes in the same website (one for the product pages – the existing one, and one of the blogs – a new theme).

Halfway through the project, the project lead called us up and told us that our website uses WP Engine which doesn’t allow the usage of two different themes in the same website and that we need to host the blog site with the new theme using a separate instance.

As this was an assessment mistake on their end, they said that they would host our blog site using their own cPanel for a year and we just have to point our domain to that IP. Now, my question is will doing this be bad for our website? Is there any workaround for this? What do you think would be the best way to deal with this.

As stated earlier, I’m not that fluent with WP, so if you need any more details, I can ask my colleagues to share them here.

We were planning to update the look-and-feel of our website but not for all the pages. We wanted to keep our product pages the way they are right now and apply a new theme to just the pages under /blogs.

To get this done, we hired an agency as we did not have the technical expertise to get it done inhouse. The agency assessed our project and said that it would be possible to use two different themes in the same website (one for the product pages – the existing one, and one of the blogs – a new theme).

Halfway through the project, the project lead called us up and told us that our website uses WP Engine which doesn’t allow the usage of two different themes in the same website and that we need to host the blog site with the new theme using a separate instance.

First, there seems to have been some misunderstanding or miscommunication here.

WordPress does not support having two separate themes in THE SAME WordPress site. It’s simply impossible, and this has nothing to do with WPEngine, cPanel or any other hosting service or control panel.

What your agency might have conceived, even if it was not clearly communicated as such, was to have TWO SEPARATE WordPress sites… on the same domain… one at example.com for the main website, and the second at example.com/blog/ for the blog. Then they could use different themes for the two different WordPress installations.

And, yes, WPEngine does not support the installation of a WordPress site under a subdirectory like example.com/blog/

As this was an assessment mistake on their end, they said that they would host our blog site using their own cPanel for a year and we just have to point our domain to that IP. Now, my question is will doing this be bad for our website? Is there any workaround for this? What do you think would be the best way to deal with this.

Firstly, if you want to maintain your main website example.com at WPEngine, it’s technically impossible for your agency to host the blog on their channel server (or anywhere else) at example.com/blog/… because it is impossible to point a subdirectory to an IP address. You can only point and use a sub-domain like blog.example.com for the blog. If your agency hasn’t told you this already, you want to confirm with them.

Of course, you can choose to move both the main site and blog to your agency’s cPanel server, but then I also have other concerns about the whole idea of having two separate WordPress installations.

My second concern is that of losing your GOOGLE SEO and all the links and traffic currently coming to the pages on your blog. While the current entry point for your blog is https://www.crackverbal.com/blog, ALL the blog posts live under https://www.crackverbal.com/ domain. Eg, you currently have

https://www.crackverbal.com/gmat-inequalities/ … and NOT

https://www.crackverbal.com/blog/gmat-inequalities/

So whether you move your “blog” to a subdomain like https://www.crackverbal.com/blog/ or sub-directly https://blog.crackverbal.com, you’re going to lose all the Google SEO to all your existing blog posts, and any external links pointing to any of your blog posts (either from Google search results or third party websites) will break.

Of course, special care can be taken to redirect these broken links to their equivalent new address at https://www.crackverbal.com/blog/ or blog.crackverbal.com… but this will be a tedious manual process for EACH blog post, as there’s no URL pattern for just your blog posts to make automation possible.

My third concern is that of brand INconsistency. Why do you really want to have your blog design to be different from your main website design? I thought BRAND CONSISTENCY would be a prime objective?

My fourth and final concern is the added burden of now having to maintain two separate WordPress installations, themes and sets of plugins… irrespective of where these are hosted. Even if your “agency” offers to host it for you for free, will they also maintain it at no cost? What if a WordPress update breaks your theme or some plugin? Will they take care of it for no cost? What if you have to part ways with this agency?

These should be food for thought!

We were planning to update the look-and-feel of our website but not for all the pages. We wanted to keep our product pages the way they are right now and apply a new theme to just the pages under /blogs.

I’ve already pointed out above that, while the entry point to your blog is /blog, the actual blog posts live at the root domain (https://www.crackverbal.com/) and NOT the subdirectory (https://www.crackverbal.com/blog/).

I wanted to quickly add that, even with this, and even with a single WordPress site and a SINGLE THEME, it’s still possible to style your blog POSTS differently from your PAGEs (which make up your main website).

To be absolutely clear, what I’m saying is: while a single WordPress site can only have ONE ACTIVE THEME, there’s no rule that this single theme must have the same design for everything.

Even with a SINGLE THEME in a SINGLE WordPress site, it is still possible to have different layouts, differtent page elements, and even different color schemes and designs for different sections of the site.

For instance, you may want:

• — Your main site (homepage and other non-blog pages) to be one column
• ONLY YOUR BLOG POSTS (and blog archives) to have a right sidebar with only blog-related content (eg latest posts, archives, categories, etc).
• You can eve design SOME individual pages as “landing pages” with no header, no footer and no sidebar at all, only the sales information or opt-in form that you want people to pay attention to.

That’s all possible within a SINGLE THEME. The sky is really the limit, and that’s all up to the theme developer to make that magic happen.

Hi George,

Thanks for the detailed analysis of our issue. I shall share this with my team to see how we can proceed.

Cheers!
Mir