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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.

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 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!