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A big decision early in the lifecycle of a B2B SaaS Company is the technology, domain, and infrastructure to host your website on.
Picking a CMS is pretty straightforward. I recommend one of 3 options:
Subdomain (blog.kalungi.com) or Subfolder (kalungi.com/blog) ?
The short answer is Subfolder.
Keeping all your content on one domain is ideal for SEO purposes (Google tries to weigh both options equally...but still don’t do a great job at that), it’s easier to manage/maintain and manage and potentially cheaper from a DNS perspective.
There is one exception to this advice. If you are able to manage a great static website (this requires engineering time and expertise) having a main site with a small number of great pages could be great for SEO, and in that case, you will have to get a subdomain for your more dynamic content (Blogs, Landing Pages) that your marketing team can maintain. More on this under the “Technology” section above.
There are many opinions on this topic, so feel free to find out where I got my input from:
John makes a strong case for subfolders:
https://ignitevisibility.com/why-blogs-on-subdomains-are-basically-worthless-for-seo/
Google says it really does not matter:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/
But this blog explains why you need to be careful to follow Google’s advice:
https://www.tutorialguidacomefare.com/which-is-better-for-seo-a-subdomain-or-a-subdirectory/
Of course there is a Moz Whiteboard Friday Video:
https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
This Quora discussion wraps up the debate:
https://www.quora.com/Subdomain-or-subdirectory-which-one-is-better-for-SEO
When you pick your CMS, this can point you to certain hosting options (HubSpot CMS is hosted by HubSpot, and they run on Amazon Web Services, Wordpress comes integrated with vendors like GoDaddy and a static site can be run on for example AWS or Azure).
My recommendation is to follow the hosting environment that comes with your CMS, and not spend too many cycles on this decision.
Once traffic grows you can optimize performance with various caching solutions, and you can worry about that when that time comes. In reality, AWS and others already do this for you in most cases.
Stijn is Kalungi's co-founder and board member. He is a serial SaaS marketing executive and has over 30 years of experience working in software marketing. He is co-author of the T2D3 book and masterclass that helps startups drive exponential growth.
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