How to Add WordPress to Your Existing Website
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in use today, powering more than 27% of the websites on the internet. The system is easy to use and provides extensive flexibility to allow non-developers to create fully functioning websites without needing a programming background.
The most popular CMS solutions including WordPress are available to install on your own server, allowing you to benefit from all the advanced features offered by the software without needing to pay for hosting.
However, the CMS is quite complex and comes with a learning curve. If you’re looking to add this popular content management system to your own website, this article will guide you on how to do it right.
The Anatomy Of A WordPress Website
You don’t need to be a web developer to use WordPress, as the system is highly modular and based on a typical LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). This means that you don’t need to have all the programming skills to get up and running with WordPress. You’ll be able to install a basic version of the CMS on your own server with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Once you’ve got WordPress installed, you can start creating your website. Like other content management systems, WordPress provides you with a fully functioning content publishing platform that allows you to quickly add content and functionality to your site.
The primary difference between WordPress and other CMS solutions is that you don’t need to write a single line of code to add a blog to your site. You can quickly import all your content from an existing blog into your new WordPress website.
When you first install WordPress, you’ll be presented with a login page. You can use this to create a user account that allows you to log into the back end of the system. Once you’re logged in, you can click the Tools button in the top menu to access the WordPress toolkit.
This will display all the available WordPress tools and functions, offering you the ability to create, edit, and publish content on your site. You don’t need to be a programmer to use this functionality, as you can use the intuitive UI to do anything you need with ease.
Step 1: Install WordPress
Installing WordPress is quite simple, as there’s only one required plugin to get started: the WordPress Plugin Installer. This plugin will assist you in installing the WordPress CMS on your own server. Once you’ve installed the plugin, click on the WordPress icon on your toolbar to launch the WordPress installer.
This will download and install the latest stable version of WordPress on your server. Once the installation process is complete, you can click on the Launch button in the WordPress dashboard to launch the content management system.
Step 2: Configure WordPress
Now that you’ve installed WordPress and it’s running on your server, you need to configure the content management system. For this example, we’ll assume that you installed WordPress on a Linux-based virtual server with the default options (we’ll talk more about this in a bit).
To start, you’ll want to log in to the WordPress dashboard and click the Settings button in the top menu bar.
This will take you to the Settings page, where you can configure various settings for your WordPress installation. From here, you can enable Developer Mode (which allows you to customize nearly every aspect of the CMS), activate or deactivate JavaScript, and change the default language on the site to English or French.
Step 3: Add WordPress to your Existing Website
With WordPress installed and configured, you can easily add the CMS to your existing website. To do this, you’ll want to follow the instructions provided by the WordPress Plugin Installer plugin. This plugin provides a very easy and streamlined process for adding WordPress to your existing website. Once you’ve installed the plugin, you can navigate to your website’s dashboard and click on the Add New button in the top menu bar.
This will take you to a simple form where you can enter the URL to the WordPress content that you want to import into your site. For this example, we’ll use the free WordPress.com account that we have setup as a basis for this tutorial. Navigate to the WordPress.com homepage and open the import function by clicking on the Dashboard link in the top menu bar. Enter the URL to the existing blog that you want to import into your new WordPress site into the text field titled “Import from blog…” and hit the Import button.
This will take you to a confirmation screen where you can click the Activate button to complete the process.
Conclusion
Adding WordPress to your website is very easy to do. The process is simply matter of creating a link to the WordPress content that you want to import into your site and clicking on the Add New button to start the import process. From there, you can navigate to the Settings page and change the language on your site to English or French if you’d like.
WordPress is a popular choice among bloggers and content creators due to the simplicity of the software and the large amount of third-party plugins available that can be used to extend its functionality. If you’re looking to add a content-managed platform to your website, WordPress is an ideal choice due to the large amount of documentation available online and the large community that supports the platform.