How to Link Your WordPress Site to an Existing Website

You’ve just launched your personal blog and are eagerly waiting for the first blog post to go live. You’ve spent the last few days planning out the content, practicing your writing and perfecting that eye-catching header photo. Suddenly, your internet browser begins to sputter and die. You try refreshing your web browser, only to find that the moment of publishing has disappeared. After hitting the refresh button over and over, you realize that something is wrong.

The glitch is that, in the course of creating your blog, you’ve linked your blog to a WordPress.com account that does not yet exist. When someone clicks on the link, they’ll be redirected to a notice that the blog they’re trying to visit does not yet exist. If you’re worried that this might happen to your blog, fret not. We’ve got you covered.

The Fix

Let’s back up a bit, step back into the early days and imagine that you’re a newbie blogger just looking for a way to get your content online. You’ve decided to try out WordPress because it’s the most popular content management system around, and it’s free to use. After entering your email address and clicking the “Create Your Blog” button, you’re brought to a landing page with a link to the WordPress.com homepage.

Since you’re new and don’t yet have a blog, you’re initially presented with a one click option to install WordPress.com. Once you’ve done that, you’re brought to a login screen that asks you to choose a username and password. The next step is to log in and click on the Gear icon () in the top right corner to access your WordPress dashboard. From there, you can browse through the different pages, templates, and settings to get a feel for how WordPress works and how you can customize it to fit your needs. The last step is to click on the wp-login button () at the top of the page to log in to your blog. You’ve now officially launched your WordPress blog and can begin adding content.

Set Up the Link

WordPress makes it easy to link your blog to another website. Once you’ve got your WordPress dashboard open to the Settings page, you can navigate to the General tab and click on the Link button (). From there, you can paste a URL—that’s a website address—into the box that opens up. When finished, click on the Save Changes button to finalize the settings.

Now when you visit your blog, you’ll see a small padlock icon () in the top right corner. This is a signal that your site is safely secured with a https:// (the secure version of the internet). Before you begin writing your first post, take a few minutes to explore the features of your WordPress dashboard.

Write Your First Blog Post

The first step to truly understanding how WordPress works is to write a blog post. To get started, click on the Posts icon () in the top right corner of your WordPress dashboard. From there, you can select the Post » New Post option to open up a blank writing screen.

You can add any content you want to a blog post. All you need to do is insert a paragraph for each topic. To make it easy to keep your posts organized, you can also use the dashboard’s built-in sections to structure them. For example, you can divide your blog posts into categories like “Travel” or “Hobbies”. When you finish writing your first blog post, click on the Publish button () to submit it to the internet for others to read.

Customize Your Blog’s Appearance

As we’ve already established, WordPress makes it easy to link your blog to another site. Once your blog post has been published, you can click on the Appearance menu () and then select the Settings screen to access your blog’s appearance options.

Here, you can change how your blog looks depending on the device it’s being viewed on. For example, on a desktop computer, you might want to select the Fullscreen (fluid) layout. If you’re publishing on a cellphone, probably a landscape-mode video would look best.

You can also use the Settings menu to change the header and footer graphic at the top and bottom of every page, as well as select the layout for your blog’s posts and categories. To make things easier, you can also install the WordPress Dashboard widget area which will place all of these settings on one page (Settings).

Make Sure Your Blog Is Linked To Each Post

As you write more and more blog posts, you’ll notice that all of them seem to be connected to each other. This is because you’ve linked all of your blog posts to the same website address (URL) in the “Link” field of the Post editor. To link a blog post to another website, simply type the web address into the Link field and press the Enter key on your keyboard or click on the button with the ∞ symbol next to it ().

If you’ve ever tried to link a blog post on WordPress.com and the blog post doesn’t work, it’s likely because you haven’t linked it to a live website yet. When you’re finished making your blog post, visit the URL you just created in a new browser window or tab and you should see the words “This Is A Blog Article” as the first line of text.

Monitoring Your Blog’s Performance

Once you’ve got your blog set up with a working link, it’s time to start monitoring its performance. To do that, click on the General tab and then click on the Analytics button (). From there, you can view key metrics about the traffic to your blog.

You can also use the Traffic button () to see all the different sources that led to your blog.

For example, if you notice that a large number of your blog’s visits come from a certain country, you can check that country’s IP address (a kind of “phone number” for the internet) against any banned or restricted IP addresses.

Also, by clicking on the Traffic Sources button (), you can get a detailed list of all the different platforms (eg. Facebook, Google, etc.) or devices (eg. smartphones, tablets, etc.) that brought visitors to your blog.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we showed you how to link your existing WordPress website to another existing website or online resource for easy branding and content integration. We also revealed the General tab in the WordPress dashboard, explaining its contents and how to use it. Since you’ve already got an existing blog, you can use this process to integrate it with your existing site. And if you’ve got other web resources you’d like to brand and include on your site, this tutorial gives you the tools to make it happen.