I am not a coder, and I would like to get HN’s advice.<p>Our website is a marketplace for digital downloads. The entire system is built on Laravel, and we’re currently looking into options for adding in a blog and tutorial section that will require a CMS.<p>That said, our dev is recommending that we use Craft (https://buildwithcraft.com/) as the CMS for the blog, tutorials, and for the rest of the site. We'll then move the Laravel system that handles our user system and products into a subdomain. It would look something like browse.oururl.com instead of oururl.com/browse.<p>He said the only other option is to hack something together using Laravel Bootstrap, (https://github.com/davzie/laravel-bootstrap) or something similar, for handling the blog and tutorials. The drawback is that it wouldn't be as robust.<p>Should we be concerned about using a subdomain for this purpose? Will there be any performance issues? SEO issues? Low T issues?<p>Maybe we’re making a mountain out of an ant nipple, but it's hard not being a coder and not knowing any better. I though I’d ask HN’s advice before giving the go ahead.<p>Thank you in advance for your advice.<p>-T
Moving content from one URL to another is going to create SEO issues. The issues aren't permanent, but if you rely on search traffic for cashflow, you just can't do it.<p>It's possible (but not necessarily as performant) to have your Craft code running at oururl.com/blog and oururl.com/tutorial, but your Laravel code running at your other URLs. It really just depends on how your server is configured (and which server you're using).<p>Generally speaking, I think there are reasons to use subdomains (addressing different regions perhaps, definitely when running a different SaaS codebase).<p>For your purposes, I don't see a good reason to use a subdomain, and it does add a little complexity related to configuration, cookies, SSL certs, and user perception.