Blogging #3: Using your own domain
If you're going to have a blog, you need to use your own domain name, period
At this point you should now have two things under your belt:
You understand the commitment involved in writing a blog
You now have a basic Wordpress blog up and running on WPEngine
Some of you may have already started writing blog posts, if so - more power to you! If not, don’t worry, there’s no rush to write your first post and still plenty of fun setup to do to make your blog unique and customized to you.
While you could always stick with a subdomain off of WPEngine, i.e. your-blog.wpengine.com, this is non-ideal for a lot of reasons. More than anything, as you write your blog you’re going to be building a brand, and you want to own that brand, period. The only way to do this is to own the domain name behind the brand.
What this means is that if ten years from now you decided to move off of Wordpress, or they go out of business, or who knows what else, your readers will still be able to go to the same domain name and reach your blog. Using your own domain name means that for as long as you want to blog, you are free to use any platform your want and the hard work you’ve put into building your brand, and your SEO, won’t go away.
Pointing your domain name to your WPEngine site requires absolutely no technical background and the whole process takes less than five minutes. So assuming you have your domain ready to rock, I’ll walk you through the process.
Step 1: Login to your WPEngine account, and from the Dashboard click the link next to Domain, that says “Enter domain” - it should look something like this:
Step 2: On the next page click the “Add Domain” button, it’s sitting there just waiting to be pressed in the upper right-hand corner.
Step 3: Now you’re going to add two version of your domain name. Once with the “www” and once without it since you want people to be able to get to your blog either way…right? This takes less than a 30 seconds, just enter your domain in the pop-up window as shown in the examples below.
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll find the DNS information you’ll need to use to point your domain name to your WPEngine blog. Like I said, no technical knowledge is needed, if this is your first time hearing of DNS or seeing anything like this, that’s fine, it’s a lot easier than you’d think!
Step 5: Login to your registrar and make the changes. The exact way to update your DNS will vary from one registrar to another, if you don’t know how to do this just click that purple link at the top that says “Learn how to configure DNS” and you’ll find a detailed walkthrough on how to do it.
And that’s it. Like I said, this whole process usually takes around five minutes, and poof - like that you now have a your own domain name pointing to your blog. In the next lesson I’ll tell you how to configure Wordpress to make sure everything is wired up correctly on that side and we’ll also start to dive into some basic SEO.
Get ready, the next lesson is a big one!