Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
-
Hi all,
We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the clarification on the platform Suarezventures.
I have worked with plenty of brands that have a similar setup on Shopify. They usually put the blog on a subdomain because Shopify's content management system - let's see, how do I say this nicely... sucks. These clients put up Wordpress on a subdomain. Some also put up a landing page platform like Hubspot or Unbounce to which they send paid traffic.
Your plan to put the eCommerce site on a subdomain has some benefits in that the content side won't be affected by future platform migrations on the eCommerce site. However, the content side will benefit the most from being at the main level with the homepage and most of the backlinks. Thus, organic search traffic to the eCommerce site could be harmed by this move. I normally wouldn't recommend it for that reason (because the business is eCommerce, which is what pays for the content) but in your case, it sounds like the eCommerce site doesn't bring in much traffic as it is.
Good luck. Let us know how it turns out.
-
Hi Everett,
In this case both the sites would be tied into each other and aren't that different, but my thought was that separating the online store would give us more flexibility with the root domain. If I implemented this, their WP site would be customersite.com and the e-commerce side of it would be at shop.customersite.com.
Their current website is through Square (not Squarespace), and it's a watered-down version of Weebly. Square also handles their online payments, in-store payments, customer loyalty system, and inventory management, so that's why we were thinking of relegating it to a subdomain instead of switching everything over to WordPress. Thankfully, Square makes it really easy to change the site address to a subdomain, so there isn't going to be a ton of migration work involved.
-
Thank you for the detailed response! The client has the same inventory for in-store sales and online sales, so their physical and virtual storefronts are both important to them. As for restrictions on the current platform, they're using a website through Square (which is a watered-down Weebly I believe) and it doesn't even have proper blogging functionality which is one of our primary points of concern.
-
If they are not planning to do any link building then you should be fine with setting up everything on the subdomain.
Ross
-
Hi Suarezventures,
I typically draw the subdomain vs top-level domain line at whether the two sites / experiences and purposes are vastly different. For example, a site like blogspot that hosts different websites on subdomains, or a brand that has a forum community on a subdomain because it runs on a different server and has a much different purpose than the main domain.
Ideally, if you're moving to Wordpress you'd have the content and the store on the same site (e.g. https://site.com). If this isn't possible for them, having one or the other on a subdomain would be better than having them on (Squarespace?).
What about having the new site on a subdomain so you don't have to deal with migrating the existing site? Can' t you leave it there and put up store.site.com on WP?
-
I think that might be a successful approach under some circumstances. For example, if the company is a brand, and their storefront is only one aspect of that brand but you think that they might otherwise rank for searches of non-transactional intent. An example might be a museum which also runs a gift shop. Or a manufacturer who also manages a direct-to-consumer storefront but where that is not the focus of their business. In these and similar cases, having a separate set of pages (whether on a subdomain or preferably just in a subfolder if feasible) for the commerce isn't necessarily a bad idea. I'm assuming when you wrote "proving to be highly restrictive", you meant more than just for example not being able to set the exact H1 tags you might want on a page or not being able to insert schema markup for certain types of objects. There are going to be those kinds of tactical challenges for on-page SEO in every platform, just varying degrees between the platforms, and I wouldn't take a drastic approach like separating the storefront just because of those kinds of issues. But, if the SEO challenges with the current platform are really of the highest severity and can't be addressed within that platform, then the approach of a separate storefront might make sense in the kinds of scenarios like the museum or the manufacturer mentioned above.
-
Hi Ross,
Would it still be a bad idea if we're not really planning to rank category pages or products on the subdomain? Or if they don't have much SEO traction at all at the moment anyway? Ideally we would love to switch them to WordPress + WooCommerce in the long term but everything in their business is tied to Square (including physical operations, email list and even their loyalty program) and they don't have the budget to switch everything over completely.
Thanks!
-
Hi there,
I think it is a bad idea if you are planning to rank category pages or products on that subdomain. The best option is to set up everything on WordPress with the Woocomerce plugin. The WordPress CMS is very flexible, SEO friendly and you have an access to your server if you need to pull server logs from it.
Ross
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting Homepage to Subdomain Bad or Good Idea??
I have a very old forum that still gets a lot of traffic, but when migrating over to another software that is cloud based we cannot redirect using same domain, SO the only option would to be to change the cname on a subdomain and then REDIRECT all the traffic from the ROOT domain permanently - would this be a bad move as the root domain wouldnt be used anymore as now its just setup to be redirected in order to use the software we need to use? Domain is 17 years old.
Technical SEO | | vbsk0 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
SEO Ramifications of migrating traditional e-commerce store to a platform based service
Hi I'm thinking of migrating my 11 year old store to a hosted platform based e-commerce provider such as Shopify or Amazon hosted solutions etc etc I'm worried though that will lose my domains history and authority if i do so Can anyone advise if this is likely or will be same as a 301 redirect etc etc and should be fine ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to optimize for new subdomain when root domain has all link juice and built up authority?
We recently took control of a root domain for a business that was not doing e-commerce. They just had a single page business card website at the root domain. However, it had been around long enough to have built up some amount of domain authority and link juice. When we took over to enable the site with e-commerce, we redirected the root domain to point to a www subdomain where the store is now located. Now, in my seomoz campaign, i see that all the link juice and authority stats are in the root domain metrics, and the subdomain we are tracking has nothing. What is the best way for me to take advantage of all the built up authority for the root domain to help with the newly enabled ecommerce site at the subdomain? or am I basically starting from scratch since i have been reading that link juice does not flow as well from root domains to subdomains. thank you and happy new year to all!
Technical SEO | | devinjy0 -
How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
How to move many domains form an address to another?
We need to move a site from a domain to another one, and there are also hundreds or even thousands of subdomains to move. What would be the best practise to do it in order to save at least some of the visibility in search results?
Technical SEO | | Tulos0 -
IMPACTS on Moving Online Store to New Platform
I, I have this online store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ built on osCommerce. This platform is NOT SEO friendly and I expecting to move it to a new platform, probably, http://www.americommerce.com/ Can I limit the SEO impact when moving this store? The domaine will be the same, but every other url on the site will change. I only know the basics of SEO, and only copy html code when I need to. So my knowledge are limited. Using Google Analytics, I have the most popular page url visit on the current store. To limit impact, I thought I should copy the most popular page URL of the curent store and do a 301 redirect on the store platform. Do you think this my limit the impact? Would there be a other way to limit SEO impact on Google search results? I don't want to be penalize if the search and up on a 401 page. Can anybody help me? Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Subdomain CMS or unique URL
I own a company for teams Ex myteams.com . A team registers and they get a site at team1.myteams.com. Content on each sub team site is mostly unique and I have several back links on each to the main site myteams.com. I also provide them with a unique URl team1.com will show team1.myteams.com. So couple questions As far as SEO should i be pushing the team1.com url or team1.myteams.com url? Is a link from team1.com or team1.myteams.com better for my site, their site or both How many back links should the sub sites have? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichaelRyan220