Subdomain vs. main domain!
Hi everyone!
Would you prefer to build the community on a subdomain or the main domain? I lean towards a subdomain to keep it separate, but it may have drawbacks, especially with certain single-license plugins over time. What’s your take?
Reshad Reshad it all depends about the business case.
Huge eCommerce on Main Domain
If you have a huge eCommerce store on the primary/naked/apex domain then you can make a desicion that fCommunity is just a Fun part and you wont use it much for Selling Products - in this case you are not thinking of integrating it deeply with FluentCRM. You can use it out of the box solution in this case.
When someone put your Community down your primary domain wont be affected at all (if hosted on two different servers etc).
Small Content Creator
If you are a small content creator and you want to heavly use all Fluent Products maybe it is better to keep everything on the same domain - it will be easy to integrate with FluentCRM.
My granma said: "don't keep all eggs in one basket" but she always had only one fridge. Did she lie to me or she knew that she can buy a new fridge and eggs fast with 1 day delivery and setup.
Should we worry about our website being put down? I dont think so. Even if someone will break our website we can quickly restore it form the daily backup - if we are small size company it shouldnt be any problem to manage everything with one domain (more WP instances = more backups, updates etc).
Other business case:
SEO satelite sites - similar to PBN (Private Blog/Community Network)
You can use your Fluent Community for SEO content. As far as you will have any activity on the Community (you dont care much) you might use is for backlinks to your Primary Domain if you know how to correctly set it up to get the link juice only towards your primary domain but not to any other external domain submitted by your community members.
BTW: If you are focused on a security then splitting assets might be beneficial but it is not a banking website so I am not sure if its worth it to split WP instances where hacking WP is quite easy. Most of WP websites dont even block Author/Users Listing or Plugin listing or dont use any CDN, WAF etc but even if they use, it is easy to skip CloudFlare in some case scenarios (example: if the server is not configured correctly for incoming traffic etc). If you want to be fully secure then dont use WP haha.
That fridge analogy is THE BEST Mat 😂
Personally, I'm leaning towards the two domain model:
Main domain - marketing, where all the pretty stuff is done. The place I'm most likely to want to use a staging site for changes and not have to worry about all the FC & FCRM data when I'm pushing live. It's also the one where I'll need the most caching because it's the most likely to see spikes in traffic.
members. domain - FCRM and FC, no caching necessary, everything lightweight and transactional. Much simpler styling so will probably have fewer plugins.