Hello, and thanks in advance for any help and information that you can provide.
I already have an existing website (https://www.djregular.tech/) that I’d like to add a blog to. I’ve looked in this forum, the Ghost(pro) knowledge base, and around the internet, and it seems as though the way to do that would be to use a subdirectory. I’ve found the following guides:
Will following either one of these allow me to use Ghost with my existing setup? Do I even need to set up a subdirectory? Or is it not possible to add a Ghost blog to a site that it’s not already hosting.
I added a Ghost blog for Cliff Endsley and we simply put Ghost on a subdomain blog, with the rest of the site running on www and re-created the navigation in Ghost so it’s (almost) transparent, with Ghost at Cliff Endsley - Tales of Adventure, camera in hand
Thank you for responding. Could you explain what I need to do add Ghost to a subdomain of my existing site? I’m currently using Cloudflare to manage my DNS so if I’m understanding you correctly, if I follow this guide through Step 4, that should set up Ghost on blog.djregular.tech?
Possibly you have to SSH to the Droplet and change the domain Ghost “thinks” it is under to blog.djregular.tech - else all internal links will fall apart in Ghost.
Cloudflare DNS… basically blog.djregular.tech should point to your Digital Ocean Droplet, and then you need to update the menu items on www.djregular.tech to link the “Blog” menu item to blog.djregular.tech, and then in Ghost link the menu items back to www.djregular.tech
This makes any sense? I don’t know your setup, pls let me know how you’re hosting…
I have not set anything up with Ghost yet at all, because I want to be sure I know what I’m doing before I purchase anything. I understand that the menu items on each site would need to link each other.
Currently, I have djregular.tech, which I already have hosting for. The domain name is managed through Cloudflare. That’s my current set up. I reiterate, I have not set anything up with Ghost yet.
What I’m asking: What do I need to do to blog.djregular.tech actually works? I assume that these are the steps, please correct me if I’m wrong:
Create Ghost Droplet on Digital Ocean
Make note of the ip address of Droplet
In Cloudfare, create an A record of Name: blog.djregular.tech and with an ip address that matches the Droplet
Connect to the Droplet via SSH, begin installing Ghost, then when prompted for my blog address, enter blog.djregular.tech.
If this isn’t correct (or if I don’t need to use a Droplet at all) please let me know.
Yes, that sounds about right, you may also want to add a ipv6 AAAA record if DO provides you with one, it will be something wonky like 2a02:4f6:c012:f5d6::1
Ghost needs Node as its webserver. Most cheap hosting packages don’t let you install node, and don’t provide it.
You haven’t shared enough about your existing setup, but you probably need to run Ghost somewhere other than your current hosting, unless your current hosting is a VPS.
The first link (Cloudflare) allows you to make your Ghost blog look like it is at your current site’s /blog/ folder, even though it isn’t.
(Sorry for the late post - it got lost in my drafts)
Not yet added to this thread: For SEO purposes, blog .yourdomain. com is a totally different domain than www. yourdomain. com. In general, the conventional wisdom is that it will be better for SEO to have the blog at www. yourdomain. com/blog, so that the two sites can share the domain rank. That’s an argument for the subdirectory setup, even though it’s more of a pain to implement.
Google treats subdomains and subdirectories equally from an SEO standpoint. There is no inherent SEO advantage to using one over the other
The menu structure will link the www. and the blog. subdomains.
The sitemap.xml for blog. will not include the www pages.
Also, the Digital Ocean droplet contains all you need - Ubuntu/Nginx/Node/Ghost, it’s a one-click VPS config ready to go after you tell it which domain to assign.
… so it seems to me neither Bing nor Google “discriminate” against subdomains. Perplexity’s research indicates that subdirectories tend to perform better, but I’m not so sure.
… also setting up Ghost on a subdir /blog is 10x factor pain technically, especially if you’re running a a proxy / cloudflare / CDN in front of it. Or, maybe there is an easy way that I don’t know about.
I’m using aws services for my website and ghost blog. I added a ghost blog as a subdirectory to my website by using aws cloud front as a reverse proxy.
