Do You Need To Register A Subdomain

How to Gear up a Subdomain on Your WordPress Website

Sergei Davidov
onWordPress
10.01.21
ten

Subdomains are a slap-up way to separate websites — dividing them clearly and allocating them to specific target audiences for improve and unique experiences. Notice what they are, why y'all should employ them, and how to install a subdomain on WordPress.

At that place are many different purposes for dissimilar websites — some deal with commerce, others with data, and others accept to do with marketing. What many people may not know is a unmarried website tin be additionally divided into smaller websites, for dissimilar purposes.

You may desire to create a staging website to examination new updates, plugins, and themes; or, yous may want to create a separate website to deal with east-commerce; or perhaps you simply desire to create a articulate separation between your mobile website and your desktop version, or mayhap even a location-specific separation. To do this — to split your website into smaller websites — yous tin can use subdomains.

A subdomain is an extension to your main domain proper name. It lets you create a carve up "part" of your main domain — for example, blog.yoursite.com, and human action as a split up website.

In this post, we'll explain why you lot may need a subdomain to your WordPress site, and show you, stride-by-step, how to employ cPanel to prepare up a subdomain and install WordPress.

When Should Y'all Use a Subdomain on WordPress?
Subdomains vs Subfolders
How To Install WordPress on a Subdomain
i. Create a Subdomain
2. Install WordPress To That Subdomain
Do Subdomains Bear on SEO?
What Are the Pros and Cons of a Subdomain?
Pros
Cons
Using Lots of Subdomains? Try WordPress Multisite

When Should Y'all Utilize a Subdomain on WordPress?

Subdomains are separate websites, so you should utilize a subdomain when yous want to offer an feel that's entirely unlike from your chief domain.

Permit'due south look at a few examples of how we use subdomains here at Elementor to illustrate this. Our main site – elementor.com – is targeted towards regular Elementor users or people who are interested in learning about Elementor, its features, and widgets. Then, we take several subdomains that offer unlike experiences. Hither are a few examples:

my.elementor.com – this is the account dashboard for Elementor customers. It'southward where y'all can manage your license, subscription, websites, etc.
developers.elementor.com– this subdomain is 100% focused on developers who desire to work with Elementor's code. It's not actually relevant for regular Elementor users, which is why it makes sense to be on its ain subdomain.
careers.elementor.com – this is for people who desire to work at Elementor. Again, it's non actually relevant for people who want to use Elementor on their own sites, which is why it gets its own subdomain.

Some other examples of when to use a subdomain could be:

e-commerce store blog – if your main site is an e-commerce store, you could create a subdomain to firm your shop'southward blog as that's a distinct experience from shopping for your products.
Regional sites – if you have a multilingual site or otherwise localize your sites for different regions, you can use subdomains to segregate each region'due south site. For case, yous could accept de.yoursite.com (Germany), fr.yoursite.com (France), etc.
Divide product lines – if you lot take completely different product lines, it tin can make sense to dissever them into subdomains. For case, Disney has disneycruise.disney.go.com, disneyparks.disney.get.com, etc.
Staging sites – you can create a WordPress staging site on a subdomain like staging.yoursite.com.
Landing pages – if you desire to create a landing page that's separate from your main site, you could place it on a subdomain.

Subdomains vs Subfolders

Another common way to separate parts of your site is to utilise a subfolder, which comes later your chief domain name instead of earlier:

Subdomain: blog.yoursite.com

Subfolder: yoursite.com/weblog

For blogs, yous'll see some sites employ the subdomain arroyo and others apply the subfolder approach.

In general, you should utilize the subfolder approach if your blog is closely tied to your primary domain name and the subdomain arroyo if your weblog is split from your main domain (e.g. the due east-commerce shop case from above).

Hither at Elementor, nosotros essentially use both approaches. Our principal blog is at elementor.com/blog (subfolder) but so we too have a separate developer-focused blog using both a subdomain and subfolder at developers.elementor.com/blog.

How To Install WordPress on a Subdomain

one. Create a Subdomain

Earlier yous tin install WordPress on a subdomain, you first demand to create the bodily subdomain via your hosting dashboard.

To do this in cPanel, await for the Subdomains tool in the Domains section:

On the side by side screen, enter your desired subdomain in the Subdomain box and also select the parent domain via the Domain drop-down. There's no need to add a dot afterward the subdomain – just enter the text you want to use.

For example, to create blog.elementor.com, you would configure it like so:

2. Install WordPress To That Subdomain

Once you've created your subdomain, you can apply your host'southward WordPress auto-installer to install WordPress on that subdomain.

When y'all install WordPress, you'll be able to select your subdomain just similar you can any other domain:

From there, everything behaves exactly equally if you were installing WordPress on your parent domain.

Exercise Subdomains Affect SEO?

Another of import consideration for using subdomains is search engine optimization (SEO). Considering a subdomain is technically a "separate" site, some users worry that search engines won't pass the main domain name'southward authority to the subdomain.

For example, if you take yoursite.com and weblog.yoursite.com, some people worry that the web log won't benefit from the chief domain name'due south authority.

Co-ordinate to Google's John Mueller, Google tin figure things out itself and there's no inherent SEO do good to either subdomains or subfolders. If you go back fifty-fifty further to Matt Cutts in 2012, he as well said the aforementioned matter.

Some SEO experts still contend against this and worry that a subdomain won't inherit the full authority from its parent domain, which could negatively affect the rankings of content on the subdomain. Once more, Google says that this isn't an issue, just some people still prefer using subfolders for this reason.

However, one important SEO consideration for using subdomains is that you'll need to add each subdomain to Google Search Console and each subdomain will accept its own reports. Depending on how you're using your subdomains, yous might view this as either a positive or a negative.

Additionally, John Mueller says that using subdomains can make information technology slightly harder for Google to figure out how to crawl your site. Nevertheless, this isn't unremarkably a problem afterward the first week or then – information technology just takes Google a few days to make the connexion.

What Are the Pros and Cons of a Subdomain?

To finish things off, let's go over some of the pros and cons of using a subdomain.

Pros

Separate experiences – subdomains make it easier to create completely unlike experiences for your users.
Improved experiences – tying with the case higher up, creating separate experiences lets you optimize each experience for the user, instead of trying to fit everything into the same basic site blueprint.
Easier management – if you have drastically different content, it might simplify your administrative processes to accept each site exist a separate WordPress install on a subdomain.
Split up hosting – if you desire, you can employ completely separate hosting services for each subdomain, which might be useful in some situations.

Cons

Added complication – each subdomain is a separate site, which adds complication to your setup. For example, you might demand to manage ii separate WordPress installs instead of one unified install. Similarly, yous'll need to verify both domains in Google Search Console.
SEO considerations – while Google says you tin utilise either subdomains or subfolders, some SEO experts still recommend trying to use subfolders whenever possible.

Using Lots of Subdomains? Try WordPress Multisite

If you lot desire to create tens or hundreds of WordPress installs on subdomains, you might be better off creating a WordPress multisite network instead of creating separate WordPress installs on each subdomain. For case, let's say y'all run a local business concern with ten different locations and you want each location to have its own subdomain.

Instead of creating ten separate WordPress installs, yous could utilize i WordPress multisite install and create a network site on each subdomain.

To learn more, check out our guide to WordPress multisite.

Utilise Subdomains the Right Fashion and Reap Their Benefits

WordPress subdomains can be a useful tool if you want to create dissever experiences for your visitors or otherwise create clearly dissever parts of your site.

To install WordPress on a subdomain, you'll first need to add your subdomain via your hosting dashboard. Then, you can employ your host'southward motorcar-installer tool to install WordPress to that subdomain to launch your site.

Or, if yous want to use a lot of unlike subdomains, you can consider setting up your ain WordPress multisite network.

Do you still have any questions well-nigh working with WordPress subdomains? Ask us in the comments!

Sergei Davidov is a content creator at Elementor. His favorite topics are gadgets, advances in science, new apps and software solutions. He enjoys spicy nutrient, reading books and listening to elevator music.