Setting Up a Subdomain For Zippy Courses

When you're setting up Zippy Courses, you have to decide where you want to install the Zippy Courses plugin. If you already have a WordPress site, you may be tempted to install the plugin on your existing website or blog. However, we recommend against that for a few reasons.

  1. Keeping interests separate: Your main website should be designed to build your audience and convert existing readers into customers. A site designed to sell your course has different needs in terms of design and structure, and you want both sites to do their jobs as well as possible.
  2. Theme Limitations: In WordPress, you can only have one theme installed per WordPress site. That means that, if you have a theme you like on your main domain already, you can't use our Zippy Courses theme on the same website. If you like your current theme, this may not be an issue, but if you ever decide your courses site should have a different theme, you won't be able to change your theme.
  3. Plugin Conflicts: You may have a few (or even dozens) of plugins on your existing site already, including plugins for things like caching, eCommerce, email list subscriptions, or other custom tweaks and modifications. While most plugins won't interfere with Zippy Courses, there are instances where running other plugins alongside Zippy Courses causes unexpected issues. For example, if you install WooCommerce on your site, and set up special pages for your WooCommerce products, this can adversely affect the Zippy Courses products in the same site.

With all of that in mind, based on our experience with a variety of different sites and web hosts, we recommend installing Zippy Courses on its own website. That way, you can leave your existing site as-is, and keep your courses site 100% dedicated to serving your courses.

If you don't want to create an entirely new domain, you can create what's called a subdomain, which is a site that lives on the same domain name as your main site, but sits on a standalone subdomain. So if your main site was http://example.com, your courses subdomain would be http://courses.example.com. That subdomain will have its own installed version of WordPress, meaning it can use its own theme, plugins, and other settings.

Setting up a Subdomain

Setting up a subdomain is free for most web hosts. You can use the existing hosting that you're already using for your main domain, and create a subdomain that uses its own version of WordPress.

Here are some guides from popular web hosts on creating a subdomain:

Once you create a subdomain, you can install a fresh version of WordPress, and keep your Zippy Courses site completely independent of your current website.