When setting up a new site, deciding on its architecture is one of the most crucial decisions you can make. How your site’s data, information, and functions will be organized and presented to the world, either across multiple subdomains or subdirectories, is more than just a technical choice.
This decision will have long-term ramifications on the site in question, impacting its SEO performance, maintenance, technical requirements, and overall user experience.
In this article, we uncover what each option entails, alongside their advantages and potential drawbacks.
What’s The Difference?
First off, let’s define the two. A subdomain is a separate part of your main domain. Think of it as a sibling to your primary site under the same family name. For instance, if your main site is example.com, a subdomain could be blog.example.com.
In contrast, subdirectories are like children of your main domain, falling directly under it. They appear after the main domain name, like example.com/blog. This might seem like a small difference, but it can have significant implications.
Pros of Subdomains
Let’s start with the pros of using subdomains over subdirectories when structuring a new website.
1. Organization & Segmentation:Â If your website comes with distinct content and functionalities, subdomains can be a great way to organize and segment them.
For instance, if you have a shop or an e-commerce site as part of your main site, the use of shop.example.com offers a clear segmentation that is beneficial for both customers and internal management.
2. Flexibility In Hosting:Â A nifty little feature of using subdomains is that two or more different sections of your site can be hosted on different servers or service providers.
If one part of your site has complex technical requirements or warrants higher bandwidth, host it on a dedicated server while leaving the other in a shared hosting service. This further helps minimize interdependencies and technical complexities.
3. SEO Advantages For Keyword-Rich Subdomains:Â While the benefit of having keywords in the domain is still up for debate among SEO experts, most do believe that such a setup adds some value in terms of search engine rankings.
Having your address start with ‘cars.example.com’ will likely gain better traction when trying to rank for the keyword ‘Cars’, as opposed to ‘example.com/cars/’.
Google got rid of the advantages accrued to EMDs or exact match domains over a decade ago, but this is just about conveying intent. By setting up an entire subdomain focused on ‘Cars,’ you are sending a clear signal regarding what the page is about, significantly better than in the case of a subdirectory.
Cons of Subdomains
Along the same lines, subdomains come with their share of challenges and drawbacks:
- SEO Challenges:Â As discussed above, a subdomain does bring some SEO benefits, but the biggest SEO drawback is that search engines might treat it as a separate entity from the main domain.
This can result in your SEO efforts, link juice, and growing authority profile getting diluted instead of working together to contribute to your main site and all of its pages and content as one.
There are workarounds for this, which mainly involve extensive interlinking between the main and subdomains, but it is unlikely to have the same impact as in the case of one main domain.
- Maintenance Overhead:Â Managing multiple subdomains can add complexity to your website maintenance. Each subdomain might need its own security updates, backups, and technical oversight, which can strain your IT resources.
When dealing with multiple setups, which is often the case with subdomains, the chances of technical errors and bugs going unnoticed are fairly high, resulting in downtimes, lost data, or worse.
- User Confusion:Â If not well-integrated in terms of design and navigation, subdomains can confuse visitors who might not immediately recognize them as part of the larger site. This can negatively affect the user experience.
Integrating a subdomain effectively as part of your main site is no easy task. It requires maintaining certain aspects of uniformity that act as an umbrella that envelopes the main and subdomains, but very few websites manage to execute something like this to perfection.
Pros of Subdirectories
Subdirectories are the most preferred option for a vast majority of websites, and there are clear-cut reasons why this is the case.
- Consolidated Authority:Â One of the strongest arguments for using subdirectories is that they inherit the authority of the main domain. This means any SEO efforts you put into your site are more uniformly distributed across all content, potentially boosting the performance of each page in search rankings.
If any one article or page on your site gains a backlink or social share, it improves the authority profile of your entire site, including all of its subdirectories.
- Simpler Technical Management:Â Compared to subdomains, subdirectories are generally easier to manage because they reside on the same server, share the same security protocols, and are inherently part of the same domain setup.
Dealing with the challenges or making changes to a site that only has subdirectories is a lot simpler than working across multiple subdomains.
- Unified Brand Experience:Â Subdirectories can help maintain a cohesive brand image and user experience because they are visibly part of the main domain. Users might navigate through different sections more seamlessly, which can enhance the overall site usability.
It is much easier to execute a unified brand experience across the pages and subdirectories within a main domain than it is with a subdomain.
Cons of Subdirectories
- Limited Scalability:Â If your site grows significantly, having everything in subdirectories can become cumbersome. It can put a strain on the server, and scaling up might require a complete architectural overhaul.
This mainly pertains to large sites that receive millions of visitors and have to deal with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and processes.
- Cluttered URL Structure:Â As you add more sections to your site, your URL structure can get cluttered and long. This can affect user experience and even SEO if your URLs become too complex.
This holds true in the case of sub-subdirectories and sub-sub-subdirectories if you’re looking to show a parent-child relationship while structuring your content. Eventually, it might get too cluttered and make the entire setup look messy.
- Potential for Content Overlap: In subdirectories, it’s easy to end up with overlapping content themes, which can dilute your message and confuse both users and search engines.
For instance, a blog post titled ‘How To Choose The Right Product For Your Needs?’ and a page titled ‘Product Selection Guide’ might cover similar content while being a part of different subdirectories, such as ‘Blog’ and ‘Shop.’
Making The Right Choice
Your decision between subdomains and subdirectories should depend on several factors. Right on the top of our minds, here are a few to get started with,
- Nature of the Content: If your site’s sections are vastly different in nature, subdomains might be the way to go.
- SEO Goals:Â If SEO is a primary concern, subdirectories might be preferable due to the consolidated authority.
- Technical Resources:Â Consider your available resources. If you have a robust IT team, managing subdomains might be feasible. Otherwise, subdirectories could be less of a hassle.
Conclusion
Both subdomains and subdirectories have their place in modern web architecture, each with its set of advantages and disadvantages.
The right choice depends on your specific needs, resources, and long-term digital strategy. By considering your business goals and technical capabilities, you can choose the structure that best supports your website’s success.
Alternatively, you can consider Crazy Domains to make an informed choice. It is a dependable domain registrar that helps protect your domain and ensures a solid foundation to secure your online activities.
Visit the website for more details.
