What are the benefits of placing your app on a app. subdomain?
I see it a lot. The hompeage will be under their normal domain, but when you go to login or sign up it takes you to a subdomain like app.example.com.
What are the benefits to doing this if any? And why not just keep it all under one domain?
Thanks in advance!
Trending on Indie Hackers
The main reason I use separate subdomains is it's much easier to deploy the separate applications I have for my marketing site and web application with different subdomains. Having multiple sites on the same domain requires a gateway or router (like a load balancer) that controls which site a user hits. Another reason is SEO. Search engines treat subdomains as different sites. Since your web app and marketing sites usually have different SEO requirements, treating them as separate subdomains helps optimize each application's SEO. Also, preventing indexing or ranking issues that can happen with a single subdomain from affecting different websites.
Give the marketing team full control over www.
The amount of companies I have spoke to where the marketers can't update their site due to being merged with the app is crazy.
It seems that if you're a solo developer coding a webapp, then subdomains servers less purpose unless you're doing it for the reasons stated by @aerovulpe
Outside of what the others have said, it allows for completely separate tech stacks/servers for your "marketing" site and the actual "application" if it's relevant.
@volkandkaya Hit on the big one - other departments besides development being able to update copy across a number of pages.
What I've seen most often in small and mid-sized companies is having Wordpress at the root site, and having the marketing team completely own that - even with a designer on the team, and developers who can make minor tweaks.
We're going a different route on Hardcover and have everything under the root domain. Then by exposing a GraphQL API in Wordpress we can pull in any posts and data to the front-end. This means only content can be managed, but the core dev team still needs to get the look and feel right. It's less flexible than having another team own it, but it keeps consistency between the "sites" in a way that's extremely difficult with silos.
The main goal either way? Let marketing run at their own pace without being slowed down by development.
One issue i see with this is custom pages.
How do the marketing team build one off/landing pages without devs?
Yeah, they'd still need a developer and a designer to put together something initially. The hope would be to build something using enough templates and placeholders that the team could manage it on their own going forward for basic changes. Major changes would still need a dev/designer again though.
Yeah, i have seen so many teams rebuild the same thing (templates/placeholders).
Then marketers end up using unbounce/leadpages.