Which is the Better Choice?
Many sites use different techniques to organize content, and two of the most popular options are to use a subdomain and/or subdirectory. Each one has different benefits and drawbacks that depend on the site itself.
That said, nothing is stopping a website from using both subdomains and subdirectories. However, there is a debate among SEO experts on which one is better when trying to achieve higher rankings.
As such, today, I will explain each one and when you should use it to figure out the best option.
What Is A Subdomain?
A subdomain is essentially another website that is part of the main domain. You can easily identify these websites by looking at the URL In most cases, they will follow this structure:
https://subdomain.domain.com
For example, if you made a support subdomain for your site, the URL would look like this:
https://support.domain.com
A subdomain can be very different from the original domain. For instance, if you used WordPress for the domain name, you could use a different CMS for the subdomain. This can give you more design flexibility and offer different features.
For instance, WordPress can power your blog while something like Wikimedia could power a wiki of something related to your content or osCommerce to run an online store.
There is no limit on the number of subdomains a single domain can have. As such, many larger corporations have over a dozen subdomains to represent all of the different services or products they may offer customers.
When To Use A Subdomain?
Naturally, there are times when you want to use a subdomain because it is the ideal option. The basic rule of thumb is that you want to use a subdomain when that part of your website is very different from the rest of your site.
Let’s take a look at situations where having a subdomain is the best choice for a website.
1. eCommerce
Running an eCommerce site is very different than running other types of sites like a blog. As such, if you ever decide to create a merch shop, or an eCommerce store of any kind, adding one as a subdomain is perhaps the best option for many.
This allows you to build an entire site dedicated to eCommerce. This can help keep your main site clean, and ensure your eCommerce site can focus on making sales to customers. Many companies will do this and often have a URL structure like:
https://shop.domain.com
This is just one example, other popular names include store, merch, and more. Since eCommerce sites are more complicated, keeping everything on a single subdomain is a much better choice.
2. Support
If you sell a product or service to your customers, you will want to create support pages that can help customers use and troubleshoot what you are selling. As such, having an entire subdomain dedicated to your support is a great plan.
This avoids getting in the way of any sales by users stumbling into support articles when looking through the main site. This also gives you the freedom to build a dedicated knowledge base and FAQ within WordPress. A structure for one could look like:
https://support.domain.com
Some alternatives to support include knowledgebase, kb, faq, and more. This can also help you integrate a chat system that connects with support agents, whereas your main site might have one that connects with sales agents by default.
3. Blog
Many businesses will create a corporate blog to display their proficiency on certain topics or to provide deeper insights into some of their future choices. Adding your blog to a subdomain is a great idea if you want to keep that content separate from the rest of your site.
For example, if your main site focuses on trying to sell a product or service, having a blog post pop up can break the flow of the site and lower the chance a consumer makes a purchase. As such, keeping the two separate is great. The structure could look like this:
https://blog.domain.com
Depending on the nature of the content, you may want to workshop the name to match it. For instance, if your blogs are more in the form of product reviews, reviews may be a good choice instead of blog.
4. Different Region/Language
Does your company operate on a global scale? If so, you already know that different regions have different requirements and need to be in the language of those countries to be successful. As such, many corporations have subdomains dedicated to different regions.
This allows them to create a single site built around a specific culture or language to appeal to a wider audience. This can also make it easier for non-native speakers to select their language before entering the site. For instance, imagine this structure:
https://french.domain.com
This would be the French version of your site. This can be applied to any language like English, Spanish, Italian, and so on. This ensures accessing the website is easy, and it will be entirely for that language. Be sure to inform users about these subdomains.
Yet, a lot of website developers will use abbreviations of languages, such as EN for English or FR for French.
5. Memberships
Many sites operate on a membership basis, which means that users need to purchase a membership to view the content. Most of these types of sites offer multiple tiers that dictate what the visitors can and can’t see.
Naturally, creating separate subdomains to house each tier’s content is a great idea. It can help simplify the membership process to avoid situations where visitors are viewing content they shouldn’t. For example, if you had a gold tier, you could make the subdomain like this:
https://gold.domain.com
In this case, ‘gold’ is the name of the tier. Or if you just have a single tier, you could call it members to make it obvious this content is exclusive to members. Just be sure you have a membership plugin that supports subdomains.
Drawbacks of A Subdomain
While there are several situations where you want a subdomain, having one, or multiple, can have some negative side effects. While these negatives can be mitigated, not all websites have the resources to do so.
Let’s examine a couple of things you should be aware of before you make one.
1. Time Consuming
What is more time-consuming than running a website? Running two websites. The truth is a subdomain is its own website, which means you need to manage it just like your main one. This means updating core files, plugins, and themes regularly.
This also means you need to make sure that the site is working correctly, track and fix broken links, and everything else that comes with running a website. This will also mean troubleshooting any problems that arise from normal operations.
It’s a lot of work and that’s something you need to be aware of before committing to a subdomain.
2. More Expensive
Most web host companies will allow you to have multiple subdomains without any extra costs, but each subdomain does require resources to run. As such, you may need more expensive web hosting plans to host your site when adding a subdomain.
Some plugins charge extra to be placed on a subdomain. Or in some cases, require you to purchase the tool again to use it in such an environment. This can quickly increase the price of building a subdomain that may not make it the best option for you.
In other cases like backup solutions, you may need to pay extra for the subdomain, as it will contain an entire website’s worth of data.
3. Complicated Analytics
Viewing your website statistics is relatively easy with tools like Google Analytics, but that’s because all of the data comes from a single website. A subdomain is a separate website with its own analytics. As such, things are going to get more complicated.
You’ll need to track statistics on both sites simultaneously to get the full picture. This only gets more complicated as you add more subdomains to your site. That said, once you learn the process, anyone can do it.
4. Rank Slower
Since a subdomain is its own website, the content on it will not be indexed at the same rate as your main site. This can mean that pages will take more time to earn a ranking on search engines.
You can mitigate this by trying to be proactive when it comes to submitting site maps, but realistically, there is no way to ensure both sites will rank at the same speed, as they will need separate visits from crawl bots to index the content.
What Is A Subdirectory?
A subdirectory is a subfolder within the root directory that can help organize content on a website. Subdirectories result in unique URL structures that have become commonplace for most websites today.
https://www.domain.com/subdirectory
The subdirectory name will appear at the end of the URL. Subdirectories can have their own subdirectories, with no limitations in place. As such, they work very similarly to categories and subcategories in WordPress.
In fact, many developers will create a subdirectory for each category on their site. It can help improve navigation and keep everything in a separate location within the root directory. That said, some developers can go overboard with them.
Having multiple subdirectories can result in very long URLs that can make navigation more difficult. As such, most sites will not go past a single subdirectory unless necessary.
Since they are easy to implement, subdirectories are a prevalent choice today.
A good example is the post you’re reading right now. If you look at the address bar, you’ll see our subdirectory in the form of:
https://www.greengeeks.com/blog/
This is the subdirectory we have for our blog, and we also have one for our tutorial and support content.
When To Use A Subdirectory?
A subdirectory should be used when a website has multiple sections with its own set of content. There is often a very large overlap between subdirectories and categories because they go hand in hand.
There are various examples where creating a subdirectory is the best choice for a website, so let’s look at a few of them.
1. Pricing
Any website selling a product or service has a pricing page or section that details all of the pricing information and what is included in any tiered plans offered by the company. This is an excellent piece of content to create a subdirectory for.
This will create an intuitive URL structure that is well-suited for sites that are focused on selling services to customers. In most cases, a site will choose the pricing name for the subdirectory and the URL will look like this:
https://www.domain.com/pricing
Most users will know that they just need to add “/pricing” to the end of a URL to find that section of the site. As such, it can help users find the information they are looking for faster than ever and hopefully lead to more sales.
2. Blog Categories
Blogs continue to be the most popular types of sites with no slowdown insight, but many today cover multiple topics like finance or fitness. As a result, the different sections of a blog have their own following.
As such creating subdirectories for each of the major blog topics on your site is a smart way to help keep these audiences viewing content they are interested in.
For instance, let’s say you want to view the blog content related to finance, you would type:
https://www.domain.com/finance
Users will find all of the posts about your financial content in this area, which will be separate from your main section. This would not only help users find what they are looking for but also increase the likelihood they click on other pieces of content.
3. Checkout/Cart
The goal of every eCommerce site is to sell products to customers. Naturally, the checkout and cart are some of the most vital areas of an eCommerce site, thus creating a subdirectory for each one is a great idea.
While having a big button that says checkout or a well-placed cart icon may seem good enough, you can do more. This is where a subdirectory can come into play. It makes the URL of the cart or checkout area easy to find with this structure:
https://www.domain.com/checkout or https://www.domain.com/cart
This can make it easier for customers who click off a page to come back and get back to their cart very fast. Quick access to the checkout can help improve sales, so this is a great tactic for eCommerce sites.
4. Landing Pages
A landing page is a dedicated page built for a marketing campaign. The intention is that users who land on it will visit the rest of your site and perform a certain action like buying a product. As such, it is good practice to add landing pages as a subfolder.
This is because all of the traffic will be counted with the rest of your site, which makes the analytics aspect much simpler. Landing pages should contain links that bring visitors to the area where they can act (i.e. buy a product).
Many websites will rotate their landing pages depending on the time of year. For example, a store may have a page for Black Friday and a different one for Christmas. As such, the URL structure may look like this:
https://www.domain.com/christmas or https://www.domain.com/blackfriday
Subdirectories are easy to disable, thus they are a great choice for landing pages since you can disable them when the sale or event is over. Just be sure to have some redirections in place to avoid 404 errors.
Drawbacks of A Subdirectory
While subdirectories bring a lot to the table, there is no denying that there are some drawbacks that can occur from using them. However, these are not problems for every website and depend on the developer’s intent.
Let’s examine a few problems you may run into when adding a subfolder to your web hosting account.
1. Fewer Design Options
Unlike subdomains where you can create a unique design for the content, subdirectories limit you to what you can do on your main site. While some may see this as an advantage as it has your site using one universal design, others don’t see it that way.
Being able to add a unique design that fits a specific type of content better is just a better design option. This not only impacts the appearance but you are also limited to the same CMS, whereas a subdomain allows you to use a different one.
One way around this is to use another CMS installation to manage your subdirectory.
For example, we use several installations of WordPress as subdirectories for the blog, tutorial, and support sites. However, it can get a bit confusing, especially if you use automatic login apps such as Google’s password manager.
Subdirectories are not always registered as separate entities in Google Chrome.
2. Longer URLs
I’ve mentioned this already, but there are no limitations on the number of subdirectories you can create. As such, it is easy to create a messy URL structure that can negatively impact the SEO of your website.
Generally speaking, you want the URLs for your site to be compact and easy to understand. Having too many layers of subdirectories can mess this up and make it harder to navigate for some users.
How Does A Subdomain and Subdirectory Impact SEO?
A subdirectory exists within the root directory of your website. It adds authority to your links and will be easily recognized by search engines. As such, adding a subfolder is almost always advantageous for SEO.
However, the same is not always said for subdomains. Some experts believe that search engine crawlers can confuse a subdomain for an entirely different website, which can damage SEO efforts. In some cases, they may not even index the pages.
Yet, that’s not what Google says.
Google claims that the search engine can index and recognize the connection between your website and a subdomain. They also recommend using either a subdomain or a subdirectory because of this factor.
One problem that can arise when using a subdomain is if you are ranking pages for the same keyword. This can confuse Google and can end up in a situation where it is making a page on your main site and subdomain compete with each other.
You should typically avoid creating pages that are ranking for the same keyword, but subdomains can make the issue much worse if you do.
One distinct advantage that a subdirectory has over a subdomain is the speed of indexing. Content on your main site already has an established authority and will often get ranked faster than content on a subdomain.
Subdomain Vs. Subdirectory: Which Is Better?
As you may already realize, there is no definitive answer to whether a subdomain is better than a subdirectory. Which one is best for your website depends entirely on your needs and goals.
For example, if you started as a blog using WordPress, you may want to open up an eCommerce store using Shopify as a subdomain. This gives you different tools than what’s available in WooCommerce.
Though, I do have to say that WooCommerce has advantages over Shopify that may change your mind a bit.
Subdomains simply give you more customization options and development flexibility by being able to mix and match CMS platforms. However, that comes with a hefty price tag of essentially having to manage a second website, not to mention additional expenses.
As such, subdirectories are usually easier to manage and can help make the URL structure easier to understand. This is why many websites today choose a subdirectory because it is more convenient to manage, and the SEO effects are easier to understand.
To reiterate, a subdomain and subdirectory are equal in terms of SEO but require different managerial practices to make the most of.
Why Not Use Both A Subdomain and A Subdirectory?
Instead, of looking at this problem as having to choose between a subdomain and a subdirectory, let me pose a different question.
Why not use both?
As we have gone over, both of these methods offer distinct advantages and disadvantages. For many websites, using both a subdirectory and a subdomain is the right decision. And looking online, you will notice most major sites use both.
From an SEO perspective, there is no disadvantage to using either a subdomain or a subdirectory. You simply want to use the one that the situation calls for.
Does your website use a subdomain or a subdirectory? How has using one impacted Your SEO?
