A blog can be an important sales and marketing component of your web store, and WordPress is a great tool to manage it. commercebuild offers an integration to easily import your blog posts from WordPress.com, which hosts the WordPress CMS. In this article, we’ll go over some of the common questions our clients ask about this integration.

• How does commercebuild’s integration with WordPress.com work exactly?
• Do I have to host my blog on WordPress.com?
• Does commercebuild import the plugins and themes installed on my WordPress.com site?
• Which plan should I choose at WordPress.com?
• What if I do not want to host my blog at WordPress.com?

How does commercebuild’s integration with WordPress.com work exactly?

commercebuild leverages WordPress.com’s API to import posts. Please note that the WordPress.com API is not the same as the WordPress API.

Do I have to host my blog on WordPress.com?

Yes, WordPress sites hosted elsewhere do not use the WordPress.com API. Therefore, for the integration to work properly with your commercebuild web store, a WordPress.com site is required.

Does commercebuild import the plugins and themes installed on my WordPress.com site?

No, the WordPress.com plugins and themes are not imported. We only import the posts, post meta data, and images contained within the posts.

Which plan should I choose at WordPress.com?

A free plan at WordPress.com is sufficient to integrate with commercebuild. The only reason you might want to use a paid plan at WordPress.com is:

• You want a custom permalink structure. By default, all WordPress.com sites use the default structure, which is /yyyy/mm/dd/post-title. In some cases, you might want to change this to something else, such as /yyyy/post-title. This is only possible with a WordPress.com Business plan or higher.
• You want to host your blog entirely on WordPress.com with its own separate domain. For example, if your web store URL is mywebstore.com and you want your blog to be hosted at blog.mywebstore.com, you would need a paid plan. In this case, you would not use our integration.

What if I do not want to host my blog at WordPress.com?

Our integration currently does not support sites that are not hosted at WordPress.com. If you wish to use another host for your WordPress site, you would need to host that site on a different domain. For example, if your web store is hosted at mywebstore.com, you could have your blog.mywebstore.com point to your blog at another WordPress host.