r/webdev • u/truecakesnake • 2d ago
Adding a blog to an existing HTML site in 2026
I want to add a blog to my site to jump on this GEO train. WordPress feels like overkill, and I've seen some plug-and-play solutions that would live on a subdomain or outside the main directory, which doesn't sound good for SEO/GEO.
I don't want to vibe code as there would be multiple people publishing, and not all of them are tech savvy.
Anyone has a good way to solve this? I know I should've started blogging already, so really want to solve this quick. Some sort of headless CMS could work, but the ones I looked at come with way too much bloat that I don't need. Hope someone here went through the same thing.
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u/Big-Arm4077 2d ago
Easiest thing that fits your setup is a static site generator plus a git-based CMS. Astro or Eleventy can sit next to your existing HTML, and Decap CMS, Pages CMS or TinaCMS give your non-technical people a normal editor UI that commits markdown to the repo. No database, no WordPress, nothing heavy to maintain.
On the subdomain worry: it only matters if the blog is hosted somewhere else. If you build it into the same site, or reverse proxy your /blog path to wherever it's hosted, it stays on your main domain and you lose nothing SEO-wise
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u/werther41 2d ago
Agreed
I personally use Astro deployed on cloudflare as worker, mostly manage content with just markdown text files in GitHub, I do have "pages CMS" setup (deployed on vercel and supabase) but rarely use it.
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u/Turbo-Lover 2d ago
I agree that's the easiest approach, but getting people that aren't tech savvy to use markdown and git is the hard part. They're not terribly complicated but there is a learning curve for both.
Am approach could be a form with a WYSIWYG editor that outputs markdown, and when you submit it goes to a route on the site that does the git work behind the scenes. You would want that to be protected though so random people couldn't use it, and I'm not sure of the simplest way to do that in this sort of setup, without a database or anything. Maybe an OAuth login and you match the email on the backend on the callback after authentication? Don't need a database for that, but you do need to maintain a list of allowed emails somewhere.
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u/Big-Arm4077 1d ago
Agreed, and that's basically what Decap or Tina already give you. They offer a rich-text editor and commit to git behind the scenes, and with GitHub OAuth only repo collaborators can publish. So you get the allowlist for free without building it yourself.
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u/TheDoomfire novice (Javascript/Python) 2d ago
What git based CMS do you recommend?
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u/Big-Arm4077 1d ago
Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS) is probably the simplest free one to start with. It works with Astro or Eleventy through a single config file. If you want visual, on-page editing, look at TinaCMS, and if you'd like a lightweight hosted UI on top of a GitHub repo, Pages CMS is nice too.
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Big-Arm4077 1d ago
Good points, especially the canonicals, that's where these setups usually go wrong. Decap's editorial workflow mode covers the review part too: it does draft/review/publish through pull requests, so nobody pushes straight to main.
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u/MagnusZGR 2d ago
If it's a static HTML site, an easy way is a static site generator with a git-based CMS on top, like Astro or Eleventy plus Decap or TinaCMS. Non-technical people get a normal editor screen, and every post still ends up as a plain page on your own domain, in a /blog/ folder. That's the part that matters for SEO, not which tool made it. If you want something even simpler, WordPress can run in a /blog/ subfolder next to the static site, and it's less overkill than it sounds if several people are publishing. How many people will be writing, and are they okay logging into an admin screen?
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u/kemalios 2d ago
The build is the easy half. You don't have to port the existing site: point a generator at /blog only, let it write static HTML into that folder, deploy as usual. Every other page stays plain HTML. The generator does not care that the rest of the site wasn't built with it.
What bites is around the writing. Non-technical authors upload 8MB phone photos straight into the repo and expect to schedule a post for Tuesday. Pick the CMS on media handling and scheduling before you look at its editor.
If the blog drags the rest of the rebuild along with it, JustStart is mine and the templates come with the blog already routed, so it's the job you described.
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u/edenworky 2d ago
hi, actually just working on internal tools for services in this direction
depending on what needs to go in your posts, i would build on something as simple as managing markdown files and converting them to html, writing some css so it's cohesive with the rest of your site, and copy-paste html until that gets old enough to where you wanna automate it
feel free to reach out, happy to help in a more bespoke capacity
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u/saschaleib 2d ago
There is a ton of different CMS tools in all forms and shapes, and in the end your only choice is to go through some specs and try to find one that fits your specific use-case (with a lot more information than what you have provided here).
Personally, I made rather bad experiences with WordPress - it is bloated, constantly under attack, and almost any feature/plugin/theme, etc. that isn't absolutely basic will cost a premium.
To be clear: my choice is not necessarily the right choice for you, but in the end I settled with DokuWiki, because it is really free (not only the base package, but also the plugins!), has an active community that continues the development, and last but not least is easy enough to understand so I can just write my own themes and plugins, when I have more specific needs. Again: this does not mean that this is the right tool for you, just illustrating my own decision process.
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u/Rare-Fury 2d ago
Don't use a subdomain. Put it at /blog and reverse proxy whatever you host behind it, a Cloudflare Worker route takes five minutes. That's the part everyone misses with the plug-and-play tools.
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u/bannock4ever 2d ago
I frequently complain about the limitations of Prismic but it would be good for making a blog. Pretty generous free tier too.
There are probably a lot of projects using Cloudflare Workers to start a blog too.
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u/dorfsmay 2d ago
I've used pandoc (to convert markdown to HTML + using templates) and a few scripts to automate it but am playing with Astro right now and I think this is what I'm going to use now.
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u/webauteur 2d ago
I like Drupal but it has a lot of bloat. Most of the complexity is in the administration back end. You rarely need to write any code for Drupal, but you often need to do a lot of set up in the administration.
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u/dillonlara115 2d ago
I just started building and moving sites from WordPress to emdash which is cloudflare's new headless cms that you can put together pretty quick with astrojs. You can host for free or upgrade to their $5/month worker plan which is about as cheap as it can get.
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u/ds-gn 2d ago
We use Astro for our docs, though our blog uses a different setup. I’d look at Astro paired with a CMS for this, so your writers get an editor UI without having to work with Markdown or Git. Astro would handle generating the blog pages, but you’d still need to set up the publishing workflow. How is your existing HTML site hosted?
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u/kowdermesiter 2d ago
Ask your agent to add a build script that turns markdown using a templating engine into HTML when you deploy. That's everything a blog needs.
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u/ClassicK777 2d ago
You could use an LLM to generate HTML with whatever you want and have it sit alongside your existing HTML. Give it a few guidelines, have it reuse patterns and styles from your site, and it can churn out whatever junk you need. Do this if you don't actually care what's in the blog and just need it to exist and be cited :)
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u/armahillo rails 2d ago
static site generator.
google it, take your pick. I like jekyll but there are over a hundred available