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pros and cons of putting community and / or cart on a subdomain?

wondering if it makes sense for the purpose of segmenting the wordpress installation. on the surface, it seems like a good idea to isolate those two plugins on an their own installation that is dedicated to each, since each has the potential to scale, and because each is critical to have 100% uptime. in general, I expect it to make seo more complicated, but does it create any friction for seamless integration to the rest of the fluent suite? I'm not sure if I can really run either one without fluent forms for instance.

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Charlotte

I'll kick this idea around with you, as I'm headed down a similar path - I'm building out a single FluentCart, FluentAffiliate, FluentCommunity installation on its own domain to be fed by 3 separate (but related) brands/sales websites.

I will definitely have FluentForms on all 4 websites. In the setup you're considering, I would have FF on both sites.

I've seen what I consider to be good SEO implementation in a membership site where the community was on a subdomain. The main sales site had the blog was SEO'd normally. The subdomain (payments, community, LMS) was 99% private but had a public landing page and over time I think they built a few other public sales pages on it for additional SEO.

William Beem

Are you using FluentCRM for automation? That works best if they are on the same site. I supposed you can use webhooks to communicate across sites, but then you may not get the triggers / actions you want in an automation.

100% uptime is an unachievable goal, if for no other reason than occasional updates requiring slight downtime. You may want to duplicate the site and have a failover to the backup, which would need to be in a different location and regularly sync with the primary host.

Xopher

I've been curious about this too. Would like to hear the community's thoughts on best practices and pro/cons of using a subdomain or not for things like FluentCart (ecommerce), FluentCommunity, and perhaps even FluentCRM.

What is the performance impact to have everything under the top level domain?

If I understand correctly, WPMN uses a "store" subdomain for their ecommerce with FluentCart + CRM installed there. Same goes for this community subdomain of theirs. But I've seen some put all installs directly under their top level domain.

William Beem

Xopher I keep my top level domain as a publishing platform (blog). My tools go under a subdomain, usually called "hub". That's where I have FluentCommunity, FluentCRM, and likely FluentCart. Sometimes I have a separate subdomain for client work to use FluentBoards.

I can make a sale on my main domain or collect email addresses with a form and a webhook, so those things don't matter where I process the end result.

Whether I should separate FluentCart from FluentCommunity, I haven't though it through enough. I'm still in testing mode for FluentCart.