Your Questions Answered: Is it ok to post your content on your template site?

Some of you are looking for ways to either do more of it or get started with it.

I’ve gotten questions from you about the best way to go about it when you don’t have a WordPress website because a lot of you don’t have one and don’t need one you already have a website either is it an e-commerce site or you have an industry cookie cutter site, which you want to redesign to a custom site down the line, and you’re not ready yet, but you
want to start publishing content. Or you have a website you created on Squarespace and it looks great, and it works fine so you don’t really want to move it somewhere else and have to redo it.

Most of these template-based solutions offer a blog function that you can use. Platforms like Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, and even the industry ones have a blog function.

So why not use the blog function that comes with those sites?

First off, you want to think about your long-term business goals and how all of this content that you’ll be creating fits into the goals because the content that you create becomes part of your business assets so you really have to make sure that you won’t lose it.

What happens with these type of templatized websites is that you don’t have any control over them, and if you ever decide to move into a different platform because you’re ready for a new website, you’re ready to make a change, you will lose all of that content that you have created and all of the SEO juice that content produced.

It is important to know that if you’re going to be in business for 10, 15 years or more, you can be sure that technology is going to change so the best way to avoid losing your content is to create your blog on a WordPress.org platform, and “attach it” to your main website through a subdirectory of your domain. I know this sounds technical and it is but it’s really not a big deal for your webmaster or your hosting company.

Just make sure it’s a subdirectory and not a subdomain. The difference is that Google sees the subdomain as a separate, completely different website, as a standalone product so it’s not part of your website. With a subdomain, you can create links that are going to take people back to your website from your blog posts but it is much more effective for SEO to do it as a subdirectory.

Google sees the subdirectory as part of your website and it indexes all those pages as part of your main website, which leads to a more substantial website with a lot more pages indexed by Google within your main URL.

To get this done you just ask whoever hosts your domain to create it for you, again, this is not anything out of the ordinary.

If your host tells you it can’t be done, consider changing hosts. You can leave the site where it is, just transfer the domain somewhere else. You need to be the one in control of all of your content, this includes images, so the services you use have to serve your business.

The advantage of WordPress is that they have been around for a while and have developed, grown and evolved since they started without sacrificing the content people uploaded to it.

I first started using WordPress a few years back when I started a blog – not that I knew what I was doing- I started writing and posting on my WordPress blog and all of that content is still there. Through the years we redesigned, we changed the way we used that content, used it in different ways, but we did not lose any of it.

Remember that all of that content that you’re creating becomes part of the assets of your business, and you want to protect them.

I hope this was helpful!  If you need any help in setting this up get in touch, we are here to help.

And keep sending your questions!