Having an existing website on a hosted domain and accessing WordPress on WordPress.com via ‘link forwarding’

  • Unknown's avatar
    mickeyone · Member ·

    Ok… it’s safe to say that no one knows WordPress like the WordPress folks, that’s their main focus… (…and the word on the street is that they have ‘all’ the answers… ;)

    Here the situation… I’m trying to install a Blog for a friend of mine that has his website on a hosted domain. I’m taking the lead because my friend does not speak ‘computer’ and I offered to assist as much as I was able.

    Since the hosting domain lacks adequate support for WordPress, my question is:

    I would expect that my friend would choose the ‘free’ WP account since he is retired and we all know how that can be. So… if he set up a WP account with you folks (my-friend.wordpress.com… or whatever it is) and I place something like an ‘index.html’ file in a /myblog subdirectory of the existing website and set it up to auto-forward to you folks (my-friend.wordpress.com)… that ‘should’ solve the issue of getting a blog created for him.

    Question: Do you see any problem with having a working WordPress Blog on your site which is ‘pointed to’ by a website hosted somewhere else?

    Sure would appreciate you sharing any insight you have on this ‘challenge’.

    Many thanks,

    Eric

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi Eric,

    Just to make sure I understand, your friend already owns a domain name, but you want to shut down the current site and instead point that domain a new site hosted with us on WordPress.com?

    To have the WordPress.com site appear at the domain will require our domain mapping upgrade, and that requires one of our paid plans.

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/map-existing-domain/

    Pointing the domain to us via forwarding will also “work”, as in, the domain will show in the browser address bar, but will prevent some features, like mobile responsiveness, from working correctly, so we don’t recommend that.

  • Unknown's avatar
    garywbabb · Member ·

    Hi Kokkieh,

    Thanks for the reply…

    In a nutshell… the friend owns the existing domain which has his website. He is considering starting a Blog but support for WordPress on the hosting service he’s will is underwhelming.

    He would prefer not to move the website but rather add a link to the Blog in the website’s link-list to point to https://my-friend.wordpress.com.

    I assume that if he created a free or paid WordPress account that would work… and issues come to mind?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    He would prefer not to move the website but rather add a link to the Blog in the website’s link-list to point to https://my-friend.wordpress.com.

    Thanks for clarifying. Just adding a link to the WordPress.com site’s URL to the existing site’s link list or menu will work, yes. Another option is to map the WordPress.com site a subdomain on their site.

    i.e. if their site is at example.com, they can map their WordPress.com site to blog.example.com. Our domain mapping upgrade can be used for that:

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/map-subdomain/

    Unfortunately we do not support mapping to subdirectories like example.com/blog

  • The topic ‘Having an existing website on a hosted domain and accessing WordPress on WordPress.com via ‘link forwarding’’ is closed to new replies.