In this article, I want to go through a few ideas on when you should keep your courses on a subdomain and when you can keep them under your main website.
The answer to the question “Should I Use A Subdomain For My Thrive Apprentice Courses?” really depends on the entire environment of your website and business.
There are plenty of points to be taken into consideration. Are your online school and courses the main component of your site? What’s the traffic you get in a day? How many plugins would you be using for each website if you were to split them? And the list goes on.
The traffic on your site is a big factor. If you’re hosting a small website, you might want to keep it simple and use the same domain for all of your content. With larger websites, it might be best to have a subdomain for your courses.
Here are some situations in which you might consider having a separate domain for your online school:
Pros of having your courses on a subdomain
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Google ranking – you will be able to maintain two different sets of statistics for both your main website and your subdomain with your courses.
This can come in handy if, for example, the main domain is an online shop and you’ve also built an online school. With the two websites being so different one to another, it is helpful that you create a separate SEO strategy for each of them. -
In the case of high traffic on both websites, having a subdomain for your courses can reduce the possibility of one of the websites getting slowed down.
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It can feel more ‘premium’. You can have your main website with a shop, a blog and so on, but on the secondary one, the subdomain, keep only the courses. This way, the users that purchase access to your courses might get that ‘special treatment’ feel.
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The bridge between the two websites can be easily done (besides using direct links) with the help of Thrive Automator – here’s an example.
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You can optimize the course website by only adding the necessary plugins. You will surely not need all the plugins that are being used on your main domain on your course one as well. So each website can be optimized in its own way.
And here are some key points for hosting your courses under the main website:
Pros of having your courses under your main domain
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Having a single domain will surely be less confusing for your users – everything is in one place and there are no redirects that some users might find unpleasant.
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When taking courses, users will stay on your site. Having people spend as little as ten to twenty minutes on your site without leaving is going to help immensely from an SEO perspective.
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Since people are going to be taking courses directly on your site, this means that you’ll have a big rate of returning customers, which is a big advantage.
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It is more cost-effective and more simplistic. You’ll only pay for one domain, you’ll only have to worry about maintenance for one website, etc.
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You will not have to worry about the communication between the two websites, which can come in as extra work.
The decision, of course, will have to be taken with all of this information in mind. There is no right or wrong answer here, it’s just a question of what best suits your website and business.
Hopefully, this article was helpful. Don’t forget to check out our knowledge base for more information on Thrive Suite and all of our plugins.