I’d like to install and connect a self-hosted Wordpress blog to the same domain I’m using for softr, but as a subdirectory rather than a subdomain (so abcdomain.com/blog and NOT blog.abcdomain.com).
Is this possible? How?
There are a couple of ways you could accomplish this, but both of them may have significant drawbacks.
If the main purpose of hosting the blog at abcdomain.com/blog is about users coming into the site, and you don’t mind if the final page URL is blog.abcdomain.com, then you can set up a redirect from abcdomain.com/blog to blog.abcdomain.com, using Softr’s URL redirect feature.
If you need the final URL to continue to be abcdomain.com/blog, however, that will not work. But another possibility would be to embed the blog in a Softr page whose slug is abcdomain.com/blog. The big drawback of doing this is that as users navigate through your blog pages, the browser’s URL will not change, so they won’t be able to bookmark individual pages (among other limitations). It might be possible to work up some kind of a hack where the top level URL tracks the URL of the iframe with a fragment, so that when the user visits abcdomain.com/blog/page1, the top level URL would change to abcdomain.com/blog#page1, and vice versa. But I’m not super optimistic that this is really a good idea.
In short, there’s no way to do what you really want, which is to slice up the slugs under abcdomain.com so that some are served by Softr and some are served by a different server. But perhaps one of these alternatives would be good enough?
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Thanks for the detailed response! That’s too bad. The purpose is to improve SEO by doing interlinking between posts and related list pages, and to concentrate it to the “pure” domain rather than going the subdomain route. But I guess subdomain is the only way then.
I am pretty ignorant about SEO but I’d like to learn more about why having everything on one domain makes a difference. Can you suggest any resources to help me learn about that?
All SEO people I know advise against subdomains. In essence, they are separate and different websites from the regular domain website. This means if I get links and build “domain authority” to my blog (for specific, more “long-tail” keywords), it won’t help my main Softr website rank higher (for more generic keywords). Basically, in a way I’ll be competing with myself.
Gotta say this is disheartening. @artur are you planning to make this possible somehow?
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Hey @niclasj -
I did a little experimentation today and I have an idea about how you might be able to achieve what you want.
It’s definitely well out of the realm of no-code, but I’m guessing based on your original question that it might be within the realm of possibility.
Here’s what I think might work. I haven’t tested it yet but early experiments are good. This is assuming you want your final URL to be example.com, you want your wordpress blog at example.com/blog, and you want everything else at example.com to be your Softr app, which you host from Softr at example.softr.app.
- Sign up for a hosting service like Digital Ocean or Render where it’s relatively inexpensive to run a small server, under $10/month.
- Create a machine there and point the A record for example.com at that machine.
- Install a reverse proxy server on the machine (I tested with caddy, following these recipes).
- Configure the reverse proxy server to proxy * to example.softr.app:443
- Configure the reverse proxy to proxy /blog/* to wherever your WP installation is (or for cost savings you could potentially run the proxy server on the same machine that is already hosting your WP installation)
Warning! Like I said above, I haven’t actually tested the whole end-to-end approach, so I’m not sure there aren’t gotchas. However, this kind of approach would also solve some problems I have today, so I might well go ahead and try it at some point. Let me know if you think this solution might be appealing.
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