Building a New WP Site on Top of an Existing Static Site?

If I want to take an existing static website of mine and update it to a Wordpress one… and keep the old site by linking to it from the new one what would I do? I don’t need the old site, but I want to keep it just to view. You sometimes see people do that. They’ll link to it like this “Old Site.” It is the same domain.

You could place it in a subdomain of the site (e.g. [noparse]legacy.mysite.com[/noparse]) or place the old site in a subfolder of the new site (although you might have to update a lot of links then).

Hey ralph–thank you, man. I’ll definitely go the subdomain route. I don’t want to have to update links. It looks like hostgator has some directions here on how to do that.

Yep, CPanel makes it really easy to set up a subdomain. It literally takes less that a minute. :slight_smile:

Hey ralph. I forgot to ask you. I haven’t gone ahead with this just yet. Before I do, I should ask… what about moving the files? Don’t I have to do that? Do I select all files under “public_html” and then just paste into the new subdomain folder?

Yep, you will have to move the files to the new location. In terms of how to do it, even though you see a subfolder for the subdomain within your site’s files, I never access it there. In my FTP client, I set up a new account just for the subdomain—so it’s like setting up a separate account for any website. It has its own login details (although username and password may just be the same as for the main site.) You can see from this screen shot that it’s mostly the same as for your main site, except for the Root URL and Remote Path:

Then, when you open that account in your FTP client, you are just looking at a regular root folder, just like with any other site, and you upload your files there.

Thank you, ralph. I completed these tasks tonight. I’m reading the book Digging Into Wordpress. It’s a bit more intermediate than beginner. Was a much different install than what I’d done in the past. It’s more secure and less clutterly.