Running WordPress under a Next.js app as /blog (without SEO penalties)

I’ve been working on a project built with Next.js. Like most projects that want to be discoverable by humans, it needed a blog.

I didn’t want to:

run a headless CMS (Strapi, Contentful, etc.)

build and maintain a full blog UI in Next.js

deal with SEO tradeoffs from putting content on a separate subdomain

So I went with a slightly unfashionable but practical solution: WordPress.

The goal was simple:

Main app at yoursite.ai (Next.js)

Blog at yoursite.ai/blog/...

WordPress doing what it’s good at: writing, previews, publishing

No SEO penalty from split domains

There are a lot of questions online about this setup, and surprisingly little concrete guidance. This is the approach that worked for me.