Hi,
i have a selfhosted installation of discourse with an nginx in front of discourse in docker. I can reach it by forum.my.tld. I also have installed Wordpress, which is also reachable from public. I now want to integrate Discourse as part of the URL like www.myWebsite.tld/forum.
Is that possible and when how?
Thx
AI-generated summary
A user, Taste-OF-IT, seeks to host their self-hosted Discourse forum under a subfolder (e.g., mywp.tld/forum) instead of a subdomain, aiming for potential SEO benefits. They run Discourse via Docker behind Nginx and also host WordPress on a separate server. merefield initially shares an incorrect link but later provides the correct guide: Serve Discourse from a subfolder path prefix. Taste-OF-IT expresses concern about the complexity and asks for a concrete self-hosted how-to, emphasizing SEO as the main motivation. Moin counters by citing multiple authoritative Discourse community members — including Hawk, Jeff Atwood, and Jay Pfaffman — who all agree that there is no SEO advantage to subfolders over subdomains, and that subfolders are significantly harder to configure and maintain. Taste-OF-IT acknowledges the conflicting information, noting that while Google claims no difference, some recent analyses (e.g., this 2024 article) suggest otherwise, citing tracking data that contradicts Google’s stance. The thread ends with Taste-OF-IT thanking the contributors for the insights.
Hi Robert,
and thanks for linking to the other post, but it doesnt help me. I dont use fastly. I have a server with 2 Discourse Docker Container, test (test.domain.tld) and prod (prod.domain.tld). On another Server runs wordpress with e.g. mywp.tld. Now i want to service the Forum under mywp.tld/forum.
Is that possible?
I guess i have to do something like changing the prod.domain.tld to forum.mywp.tld in dns as an alias and on the webserver i do a rewrite, maybe?
Has any conrete solution?
Thx
Sorry about that.
I shared the wrong link unintentionally
Oh ok
Sounds complicated, but what means “…unless you are very experienced in …” in Detail. So i would see the solution to make it work and than would decide to configure it or not. Is there any selfhosted Howto for that? The reason behind that is seo. I guess its better to have the forum in the path of the primary domain and not using it as a subdomain. Or is this today not decisive?
thx
That is the how-to
You can search here for subfolder and seo and will find a lot of statements like
I think there are also some details in Handling SEO for Discourse Communities | Blog
Many thanks for the information. Meanwhile i searched too. I cant say what is right or wrong or have a better option for SEO, because the algo is a kind of black box. I also found good articles which says a subdirectory is better and they have anaylses. They also say, that google says that there is no difference, but tracking this, shows the oposit. Here are the link, which seems to be from this year: SEO Subdomain or Subdirectory
Yes obviously, thanks.