WordPress or CS-Cart Add-on?
Sub-domain or Sub-folder?
Is one more secure than the other?
Can I get the same look and feel as my main website with Wordpress? Or the add-on for that matter?
I am currently using the CS-Cart “News” functionality but would like to have a more professional looking blog. I have read many posts regarding Wordpress as well as many talking about CS-Cart Blog add-on's. I don't mind paying but I can't get a clear choice for which is better (for me).
Reading all the post has probably caused more confusion that anything.
I have never used Wordpress but from what I have read it must be powerful. Not sure I need all that power. It also appears to get hacked alot. Maybe caused it is so widely used.
I am leaning toward the Blog add-on from the Alt-Team. It seems straight forward to me, cost seems reasonable. It will be in a sub-folder (not Sub-domain) which seems to be wiser from a SEO domain/page ranking option. Not sure about the security part.
Any advise appreciate before I pull the trigger.
Thank You.
Please take a look on many offers in the marketplace and choose one, which suits your needs
items found
In my opinion, it is more expedient to manage everything from one panel instead of using 2 different software with similar functions.
Have a great weekend!
Never use a sub-folder for your blog. There are several reasons such as:
- It's insecure if the blog software (like Wordpress) is ever compromised - most have less stringent security requirements than an ecomm site.
- It forces you to keep your content in one location. Using a sub-domain allows you to distribute it elsewhere as you grow. It's simply more flexible.
- Caching and cookies will be separate with sub-domain versus sub-directory. I.e. it's generally more secure.
WordPress is the most powerful blogging system if you're primarily concerned about SEO advantages. But it has to be configured correctly. There are a lot of plugins available that will enhance the SEO benefits ([url=“Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO Plugin • Yoast”]https://yoast.com/wo...ss/plugins/seo/[/url] is highly recommended and free). I suggest you do a lot of research on WordPress and SEO before you take the plunge.
Insecure? Make sure you keep the WordPress software up to date, as well as all plugins. I've personally used WordPress blogs for years and maintained them for clients, and quite honestly the only times I've had problems has been when I've not keep the software and plugins updated.
Sorry to disagree with Tony but you should NOT put the blog in a subdomain. Google and other search engines will view that as two separate domains, thus dividing (halving!) the page rank. Ideal placement is www.mydomain.com/blog. This consolidates all incoming links (and thus page rank) to one domain instead of two.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of a blog is that Google likes freshness, so before you start down that road you need to be sure you can commit enough time and energy to keeping the blog updated regularly.
If your main goal is not SEO related, the Alt Team blog add-on you're considering is probably a good option.
I've set up two areas.
None of the add-on mods did a great job and have poor SEO and didn't work all that well as blogs. So it was just a few minutes time to set up a seperate blog with Blogger and link to it from the home page. I used most of the same graphics to give the same look and feel.
Then I used Powerblog to create a center for articles and pages for some of the same articles and additional downloadable customer resources. You can cut and paste source code from Blogger (or others) and paste it into a content page.
I'll look at a domain name change for the blogger blog to better tie it with SEO, that's a good idea, KingsleyPress.
Jack
99% of the security breaches I've been involved in rectifying were the result of having wordpress in a sub-directory. No, the clients did not keep up with all the updates for wordpress and its addons. Just like with cs-cart, the vast majority of people run businesses versus being site administrators and hence do NOT stay on top of these things (that's what the hackers expect).
If someone does stay on top of things then yes, having it in a sub-directory will be just fine. I believe that a sub-domain can have just as good of SEO results as a sub-directory if setup properly and of course if the richness of keywords and links-in are equivalent.
To me, any security advantage will far outweigh any possible small SEO deduction for a sub-domain (maybe you can explain more about why a deduction would occur for a sub-domain). As long as there is customer information (not just credit cards) on your site (or during the checkout process) then your ecommerce site should be pristine and not have ANY software installed within the same document root.
If you got a deduction for a link-out to a sub-domain, then you'd get a credit for the link-in from the sub-domain assuming you are using a lot of links within your blog that point to your site.
Perfectly fine to disagree with me. There are no absolutes. I will always err on the side of security.
If they are blogging often, they will see update notifications for the WordPress software itself and also for plugins. If they get into the habit of running the updates whenever a new one pops up it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
A sub-domain is still viewed by Google as a separate site/domain. The purpose of a blog should be to attract incoming links and visitors to the main domain, but putting it on a subdomain defeats that purpose. Google's Matt Cutts says that subdomains are useful for SEPARATING content that is completely different. That is not the goal here. Authority and incoming links accumulated at the subdomain level do not flow upward. Everything should be consolidated onto one domain/site if possible.
And for an ecommerce site with private data, you run the risk of one of these informational areas compromising the security of the ecommerce site. The vast majority of blog software could care less about security. There's nothing for anyone to steal from them other than words.
Not sure of the difference in attracting a customer to blog.site.com versus site.com/blog is. Rarely will someone use the address bar to go to the site. They will use a link on the page and this would actually give you credit for “good links in”, especially if it's viewed as a foreign site whereas a link from within the same domain doesn't count for anything.
We can go back and forth on SEO all day long. So this will end my comments about it. I'd rather loose ten customers due to an SEO ranking than to compromise one due to a security issue. While updating might be easy, it simply isn't done as a practice. Merchants have other things to do like running their business.
If I link to your site at blog.site.com, then your site at site.com gets no benefit whatsoever. The blog.site.com gets a vote from Google; site.com doesn’t.
If I link to your blog at site.com/blog, then site.com gets a vote from Google.
It’s simple math. If 100 sites link to site.com and 100 other sites link to blog.site.com, that’s 100 votes wasted. If your blog is at site.com/blog, then site.com gets 200 votes and will rank higher.
On updating: my personal opinion is that if they have time to blog they have time to hit the update button once in a while.
Just trying to help. Take it or leave it. 
And every click that goes to site.com from blog.site.com results in a “link-in” and has much more value than an internal link. Like I said, we can argue SEO all night long. The goal is to get the ranking of site.com high. More rank is awarded for a link-in than a simple page access. The point is about going “from” the blog “to” the site. Not about going to the blog. In my scenario, the blog is a vehicle, not a destination. In yours, there's no distinction of going
site.com/blog/article.html → site.com
and
site.com → site.com/contact-us.html
because they are all internal.
If your goal is to get ranking of your site because your blog has more value than your store, then that's a different problem to solve/address. Having the blog internal would imply that the blog is getting the traffic, not the store.