Your best advice for adding a blog to a website?

I use Jekyll for my startup's landing page and blog and host it on Github Pages for free. It's on my main domain, https://easyteegolf.com. The blog is https://easyteegolf.com/articles/

If the goal is SEO and conversions then subfolder 100%, some people debate subdomain but subfolder will never be worse and most likely will be better.

Give Versoly a try for it, can get a blog started in minutes and creating a landing page(s) is easy as well.

No doubt! it's a good idea to start a blog on your website. But consider posting seo-friendly articles to get organic traffic that will ultimately buy your service.
Currently, I'm doing the same with my website.

I'm using nextjs for my apps. I have a small piece of code that I reuse that creates a blog from a notion database. This way I have everything in a single codebase and notion as a cms.

Can share the code if anyone is interested.

The best way to add a blog to your existing WordPress website is to create a new site altogether. You can do this while still using the same domain as your main site, by installing WordPress in a subdirectory or a subdomain. Here are two examples of what that might look like: Subdomain: blog.yourwebsite.com. I have done this on my blog too. You can check https://khalisthings.com/product/salajeet/

Wordpress is still the best blogging solution, we have tried many solutions in last couple of years like Versel pages, github pages, ghost, etc.

• The simplest process we have found it to install the Wordpress image in cloud provides (aws, digitalocean, azure, etc.), they all have wordpress images for quick install and you can use the hosted database, so you don't need to manage anything with backups, etc.
• One of big advantages of wordpress is the SEO, google really like wordpress sites because it creates native html and clean processing.
• For your subdomain issue, nowadays DNS providers have routing setup like cloudflare, where you can easily redirect for blog.website.com to website.com/blog.

Once you do the setup, it is super easy and scalable. Don't need to think about it anymore.

If you're looking for a low overhead deployment solution (since you mentioned you were technical), I'd recommend any of the Vercel blog plugins. Most of the third party ones are CRM extensions that try to upsell you on wordpress solutions, but if you're looking for just a blog for SEO I think the default nextjs one is great!

I made https://blog.stylized.ai in roughly 15 minutes since I didn't care for styling and just wanted a couple of SEO headers and a place to put writing for later :)

Hello Julien!
Our website is customly written with JS but the blog part in on WordPress. It's much easier to manage it this way. And we were able to customise it perfectly to suit our site. Check out here: https://forasoft.com/blog

My suggestion would be to place articles on /blog subfolder rather than on subdomain like blog.domain.com. Google thinks that subdomain and domain are two different websites so you would kinda split your stats and users between two sources instead of concentrating all efforts in one spot. The /blog solution would also help with link building which is on the main ranking factors.

This year I went through exactly this for my app. At first I added the blog to a subdomain. Subdomains are nice because it can be a completely separate codebase, but as I'm sure others will tell you in this thread– if you want to get the SEO ranking benefit your blog needs to be on your primary domain.

For building the blog I went with Astro because it has MDX (like markdown with components) built-in. I was able to build an integration with my Github Releases as well as my Linear tickets and it only took a few days. I'm not in love with the look yet, but it's a start! (Blog is at https://flowchart.fun/blog)

Hope that's helpful!

Really depends on where you are in your progress. Have you a good idea on what your topics (thus target audience) will be? Are you willing to push through of 12 (or more) months of writing quality content even though you will hardly see any traffic?

There are other ways to get some really solid traffic with high search-intent landing pages. An example from my site generates a decent chunk of traffic, users and customers every month.

That said, if you have made up your mind (and again: assuming you seeing some traction), I'd say built your own (static) site.

Reasons are:

1. more control on visuals/branding
2. way easier to try things off the beaten path
3. easier to expand with documentation, changelog, etc.
4. Regarding point 3, host on naked domain instead of subdomain (useful for various reasons (wrote about that a bit too).

Happy to answer any specific question you have.

Does not look like carrd does anything that will be hard to replicate if you go with self-hosted blog. Keeping it sounds more costly.

I think it boils down to if you are able to or willing to deal with self-hosting.

In my opinion, operating a blog by yourself is a very costly affair.
Get in on any cms ex- WordPress, you can even self-host it. blog.website.com will work fine.
I followed this approach for the last 2 of my projects.

If you want to get into more control you can gatsby or any other static-generated sites.

I think this is an age-old debate about subdomains haha, but what is the purpose of the site? If it is ultimately a content site, then rebuilding in wordpress or webflow is your best bet.

If you have access to your html page use quickblogs

Use some GatsbyJS starters with Cloudflare pages and Strapi BE. I can suggest you to this starter:
https://themeforest.net/item/flexiblog-react-gatsby-blog-template/27538998?irgwc=1&clickid=SpwUstUajxyNRN-yNSwHVVdhUkAwzjRgCUdh0I0&iradid=275988&irpid=2874870&iradtype=ONLINE_TRACKING_LINK&irmptype=mediapartner&mp_value1=&utm_campaign=af_impact_radius_2874870&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=impact_radius

If you'd like for readers to continually return, you might consider launching a newsletter alongside. Added benefit is collecting their email addresses.

Everyone else has answered the technical questions and domain vs subfolder dilemma.

Something that is equally important is consistency. Blogging is hard to maintain for the “long term” so use/build a system that is closest to your existing workflows. This will reduce the friction and increase the chances you will keep it up.

E.g. if you’re already using Notion for writing, use that for blogging. Instead of having to copy the content out of Notion and into Wordpress.

My newest startup solves this problem. Most of our signups are actually from Carrd recently. You can check out the video on how it works here: https://youtu.be/8oy5T84EB1I

Happy to help as blogging/content marketing is my jam since over a decade :)

Blogs are a good idea. I'd say use whatever you're already most comfortable with which you'll also find to be most enjoyable while building.

For SEO purposes it's better to have it as a subfolder.

I actually had this exact same problem (wanting to add a blog to an existing website), and my website was on a PHP shared hosting, so I ended up creating a basic blogging platform which is based on rendering markdown files via PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

Yhaa! I answered this question for myself a couple weeks ago with one of my goals moving into the new year to write articles.

I went the route of a subdomain "blog" and created a separate codebase for this section of my website. I think this separation is good so I can update this portion of the site and not have to worry about anything else being down while the update is happening.

good luck!

Make sure the blog is SEO friendly.

1. Don't add a blog if you don't need it

In my experience, adding an attached and official blog is a critical step for validating your purpose, legitimacy and value in the eyes of the public, including customers. With that said, I would add a WordPress installation to a subdomain, so that it stands out as its own website or platform. This has been the approach that many of the well-established companies I've worked with have taken.