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
-
Keeping external links after moving from http to https?
Hi, Does anyone have experience moving a website to https? I am about to do so. I have 84 linking root domains and around 2k+ external links. If i move a website to https will these links be lost? And how to keep these links? Many thanks, Dusan
Technical SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Is there a good Free tool that will check my entire subdomain for mobility issues?
I've been using the Google tool and going page by page, everything seems great. But I'd really like something that will crawl the entire subdomain and give me a report. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
Why is Google's cache preview showing different version of webpage (i.e. not displaying content)
My URL is: http://www.fslocal.comRecently, we discovered Google's cached snapshots of our business listings look different from what's displayed to users. The main issue? Our content isn't displayed in cached results (although while the content isn't visible on the front-end of cached pages, the text can be found when you view the page source of that cached result).These listings are structured so everything is coded and contained within 1 page (e.g. http://www.fslocal.com/toronto/auto-vault-canada/). But even though the URL stays the same, we've created separate "pages" of content (e.g. "About," "Additional Info," "Contact," etc.) for each listing, and only 1 "page" of content will ever be displayed to the user at a time. This is controlled by JavaScript and using display:none in CSS. Why do our cached results look different? Why would our content not show up in Google's cache preview, even though the text can be found in the page source? Does it have to do with the way we're using display:none? Are there negative SEO effects with regards to how we're using it (i.e. we're employing it strictly for aesthetics, but is it possible Google thinks we're trying to hide text)? Google's Technical Guidelines recommends against using "fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash." If we were to separate those business listing "pages" into actual separate URLs (e.g. http://www.fslocal.com/toronto/auto-vault-canada/contact/ would be the "Contact" page), and employ static HTML code instead of complicated JavaScript, would that solve the problem? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.Thanks!
Technical SEO | | fslocal0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
SEO problems from moving from several pages to one accordian
Ive read other posts that say using accordion is not detrimental to SEO, and for conversion optimization we want to take several of our existing pages and make them into one accordion. But what will this do to seo and duplicate content as I redirect the old pages to anchors in the accordion? I would think this would be a dup content problem as www.oldinfo1 www.oldinfo2 will now have their content on the same page but I will be redirecting them to www.newpage#oldinfo1 www.newpage#oldinfo2 Is there a way around duplicate content problems?
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Move the content from mycompany.es to mycompany.com is worth it?
Hi, I've been using mycompany**.es** for 6 month and i'm quite happy with the results, recently I had the oprtunity to buy the same domain with .com (mycompany**.com**). It is worth it to move all the content to the new domain or i wont get any beneffit to be at .com insted of .es? Other facts: my target customer is spain
Technical SEO | | alfonsmr
the page is in spanish only
mycompany.es is 6 month old
mycompany**.com** is 8 years old Thanks in advance.0 -
Will errors on a subdomain effect the overall health of the root domain?
As stated in the question, we have 2 sub domains that contain over 2000 reported errors from SEOMOZ. The root domain has a clean bill of health, and i was just wondering if these errors on the sub-domains could have a negative effect on the root domain in the eyes of Google. Your comments will be appreciated. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0