Creating new Git repo in sub-folder's of git with existing source code

I'm using shared hosting and I have several website hosted into same server as an addon domain. Now I want to use git for version control

Say I have 3 website as example1.com, example2.com & example2.com. example1.com is hosted as main domain in public_html/

My dir structure is

/public_html/
  .git/
  .gitignore
  index.html
  .....

  example2.com/
    index.html
    .....

  example3.com/
    index.html
    .....

.gitignore content of example1.com is

*.log
log/*
tmp/*
.env
/example2.com/
/example3.com/

Now my question is as I already have a git repo in public_html so how can I initilized a new repo with existing code of example2.com

I create a new project in gitlab as example2 ([email protected]:myusername/example2.git) now I'm want to push code of example2.com dir into this repo.

I checked some example as how to achieve this, so I got this and this. So I tried below cmd from public_html.

git submodule add https://gitlab.com/myusername/example2.git example2.com

But I'm getting below error

The following path is ignored by one of your .gitignore files:
example2.com
Use -f if you really want to add it.

If I remove example2.com from root .gitignore then it'll add the code in to my example1.com repo. I'm too confused as how to maintain separate commit/repo for sub-folder

Can anyone help me with there knowledge.

Thanks in advance.