16 guides
Your hosted blog
A blog we run for you, on your own address: writing and publishing, the design studio, your domain, and bringing a blog across from somewhere else without breaking a link.
Set it up
What it is, the five questions the wizard asks, and how the writing works.
- What the hosted blog isA blog we run for you, on your own address, with the writing, the design, the pictures and the redirects all in one place. What it does, what it costs, and what it deliberately leaves alone.
- Setting up your blogFour questions, in the order they matter: what it is called and where it lives, how it looks, what goes in it, and whether it is live. Every answer is saved as you go, so you can leave and come back.
- Writing a postThe editor, the four states a post can be in, and every panel in the sidebar: address, checks, excerpt, cover, author, categories, tags, search and social, layout, per-post code and history.
- Pages, authors, categories and tagsEverything on the blog that is not a post: standalone pages, the people credited on the writing, and the two ways of grouping it. What each one gets its own address for, and what happens when you rename or merge.
- Your media libraryWhat happens to a picture when you upload it, the descriptions the blog asks you for, and the storage allowance. Plus the one thing to know before you delete anything.
Design
How it looks, and the one place your own code belongs.
- The design studioA set of presets, then every colour, both typefaces, the spacing and the shape of each page, with a preview that redraws as you change things. What is safe to change and what to be careful with.
- Adding your own codeThe four boxes on Settings › Code, what each one is for, the hosts an embed is allowed to come from, and the strict setting that is available precisely because you are using none of them.
Your address
The address it starts with, your own domain, and putting the blog inside your main site.
- Your blog's addressThe Rankbench address every blog starts with, how to change it, what going live and pausing actually do, and what happens to the blog if a subscription lapses.
- Using your own domainTwo DNS records, then a certificate. What each record is for, what each status on the screen means, and what to do when one of them stays amber.
- Serving your blog at /blogConnect through Cloudflare, prepare your nameservers, and understand when a subdomain is the better choice.
Bringing a blog across
Moving from another platform with every address intact, platform by platform.
- Bringing a blog acrossUpload an export, see exactly what will happen before anything is written, then let it run. Every address is kept, so nothing anybody has linked to breaks.
- What each export brings acrossPlatform by platform: which file to get, what comes over cleanly, and what you will want to check afterwards. Including the platforms that give you nothing and what to do about them.
- Redirects and old linksEvery address the blog keeps alive, which ones it creates for you, how to add your own, and the tester that says what a reader asking for a path would actually get.
Working with the rest of Rankbench
The three features that reach for a blog we host, and what each one does differently because of it.
- Publishing calendar articles to your blogThe content calendar can publish straight here, with no connection to set up and no credentials. What arrives, what happens when you have edited a post it wants to update, and where each one is edited.
- Guest posts and backlink exchanges on your blogPublishing an approved guest article to your own blog in one press, and letting your blog's pages be the ones you offer in a backlink exchange.
- Your blog in the site auditThe audit treats a hosted blog as part of your site, which means a finding on a post comes with the field that fixes it, and the crawler does not have to guess at what you published.