How to Easily Transfer Your Website to WordPress – Two Domains, One Website
You’ve created an amazing website; the design is clean and the content is good. You have everything you need to promote your business, but you don’t have the time to mess with web hosting or building out a social media platform.
If you’re looking for an easy way to launch your website, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will teach you how to easily transfer your website to WordPress so you can begin building out your online presence without any worry.
Why Should You Transcode Your Website?
Every Website starts with a HTML template, which is basically the text with tags and formatting applied to it. In other words, your website’s HTML is the blueprints of your website. When you transfer your website to WordPress, you’re essentially recoding your website from the ground-up; this is more than likely something you haven’t done before and could take a lot of time.
While it’s important to keep your website’s original HTML template, you should also be aware of how outdated and inefficient it is. The truth is, as soon as you’ve launched your website, you’ll be wanting to make some necessary changes, such as adding more content or upgrading the design. If you haven’t already, now is the time to begin transcode—otherwise, you’ll be forced to do so later when you try to make changes to the code.
Steps To Transferring Your Website To WordPress
Let’s get to the good stuff now—the steps to transferring your website to WordPress. As previously mentioned, you will be recoding your website from the ground-up, so you must have the proper tools available.
For this purpose, you will need to have a LAMP stack installed on your computer. A LAMP stack is a combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. You can download the Apache Software Foundation web server from their website (you’ll need to have root access to do this), as well as the PHP interpreter. You will also need to have MySQL installed on your computer. You can download it from their website as well or, if you’d like to keep things simple, you can use a hosted MySQL solution (like Bluehost) to get started with a free account.
Once you have everything set up on your side, it’s time to move onto the fun part—actually transferring your website over to WordPress. This process is simple but can still take some time depending on how complex your site is. You will need to make sure that you have a backup of your original website before starting the transfer process, as WordPress is inherently insecure and could potentially be damaged during this process.
To begin the process, you will need to visit your site’s URL in a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, or Safari). If you’ve ever been to WordPress before, you will recognize the URL right away; if not, it will still be something like “http://www.yoursite.com” (with or without the “www” prefix).
Once you’ve landed on the WordPress dashboard, you will see a screen looking something like this (depending on how many plugins you have installed on your site):
With all of that being said, let’s get to the good stuff now—the actual steps to transferring your website to WordPress. Begin by clicking the “Install WordPress” button in the top right corner of the dashboard. Alternatively, you can click this button in your WordPress login page to launch the install process. Either way, after a moment or two, you will see a confirmation screen like this:
Congratulations, you’ve successfully installed WordPress!
From here, you can either return to the dashboard and continue to configure WordPress as you would any other website or you can click the “Log in” button to launch the WordPress login screen.
Regardless, once you’re on the login screen it will look similar to this:
From here, you can click the “Forgot Password” link and enter your email address to reset your password. Once you’ve logged in, you can click the “Hello,” then the “Settings” button at the top of the screen to begin configuring WordPress.
To start with, click the “Settings” button. A drop-down menu will appear with various options. Here you can click the “Reading” tab to begin configuring your site’s content. You can add a brand new post or edit an existing one by clicking the “Add New” button at the top of the page.
You’ll then be taken to a screen where you can choose the categories and tags for your posts. To begin adding content, simply start typing and WordPress will propose suggested tags and categories. Select the ones you want to use and click the “Save Changes” button at the top right of the screen.
Back on the main Settings screen, you can click the “Posts” tab to begin configuring your site’s actual content. Here you can choose the types of posts you want to show—whether it’s blogs, articles, or both—and decide how you want them to appear on your site (in other words, whether you want them to be published or remain indefinitely in the “Drafts” section).
You can also choose the “Reading” option here to begin customizing your site’s content to fit your needs. Once you’ve got all your settings configured the way you want them, click the “Save Theme” and “Save Settings” buttons at the top right of the screen to lock in your changes.
Finishing Touches
Once your site has been successfully transferred to WordPress, there are a few more things you can do to make it look more like a professional product. You can click the “Websites” button at the top of the WordPress dashboard to launch your site’s URL in a new tab. From here, you can click the “Appearance” link to begin editing the styling of your site. Finally, you can click the “Profile” link to begin editing your site’s metadata (in other words, the information found under the “About” tab on a normal profile page). At the very least, you can use the “Contact Form 7” to begin building out your contact page.
As you can see, even though WordPress is a very robust content management system, it is still a bit basic when it comes down to styling and interface. Depending on your site’s needs, you may find it more convenient to use a different CMS (content management system) or simply build it from the ground-up using HTML/CSS/JS. In any case, you now have a fully functioning WordPress website that you can use to promote your business.