What is a subdomain?

In shop.yourbusiness.co.ke, the shop is a subdomain. You own yourbusiness.co.ke, and you can create as many subdomains of it as you like without registering or paying for anything.

www is itself a subdomain — the oldest and most familiar one. There is nothing special about it technically; it is a convention from when a company’s web server was one machine among several.

Both put content at a different address, and the choice matters a little for search.

Use a folder

yourbusiness.co.ke/blog — when the content is part of the same site and should share its authority. A blog, a services section, a help centre. This is the right default.

Use a subdomain

shop.yourbusiness.co.ke — when it is genuinely a separate application, on different software, or needing its own certificate, configuration or access rules.

Search engines treat a subdomain as a related but distinct site. If you want one body of content reinforcing another, a folder does that better.

• shop. — a storefront on different software from the main site
• blog. — though a folder is usually better
• staging. or dev. — a copy of the site to test on before publishing
• mail. or webmail. — reaching mail services
• app. or portal. — a logged-in area or a separate application
• docs. or help. — documentation, sometimes on third-party software

A staging subdomain is the one most worth setting up: a place to try a plugin update before it goes anywhere near the live site.

Two steps, and both are in the client area.

1. Add the subdomain in cPanel, which creates a folder for its files 2. Point the DNS — an A record for the subdomain, which cPanel usually adds for you

There is no charge and no limit. The free SSL certificate covers subdomains too, so shop.yourbusiness.co.ke gets https automatically along with everything else.

One thing worth doing: keep staging subdomains out of search results with a noindex rule, or you will find your test copy competing with your real site.