What is a subdomain?

Subdomains act as an extension of your domain name to help organize and navigate to different sections of your website. You can also use a subdomain to send visitors to a completely different web address, like your social media page, or point to a specific IP address or directory within your account.

Take the example store.yoursite.com. In this example, store is the subdomain, yoursite is the primary domain and .com is the top level domain (TLD). Use any text as your subdomain, but make sure it’s easy to type and remember.

The most common use of a subdomain is creating a testing or staging version of a website. Often developers will test new plugins and updates on a subdomain staging site before publishing them live on the Internet. Subdomains are also great for identifying and separating mobile sites (m.yoursite.com), location-specific sites (uk.yoursite.com) and creating sub-sections of the site (blog.yoursite.com).

Another common use of a subdomain is to create an online eCommerce store, like our example above for store.yoursite.com. Having your store on a separate subdomain helps make it easier to handle transactions, since eCommerce sites typically require a more complex set up.

Subdomains can be created as an A record that points to an IP address. Or, they can be created as a CNAME that points to another domain name. A CNAME can never point to an IP address.

Each domain name can have up to 500 subdomains. You can also add multiple levels of subdomains, such as info.blog.yoursite.com. A subdomain can be up to 255 characters long, but if you have multiple levels in your subdomain, each level can only be 63 characters long.

Next steps

• Ready to get started? Create a subdomain that points to an IP address as an A record.
• Or, create a CNAME to point to a specific URL.

More info

• Check out some tips and tricks for finding the perfect domain name.