Root domain or subdomain: where your storefront should actually live

You have the domain, you are on Pro, and the setup screen is asking you a question you were not expecting to have an opinion about. Should the storefront be yourname.com, or shop.yourname.com. Both work. Both are ten minutes of DNS. The reason to think about it for a moment is that this one choice quietly decides what you can build next to your storefront later without moving anything.

The real question underneath

The question is not which reads better. It is what else you expect to own on that domain in two years. A root domain can only point at one thing at a time. Whatever sits there defines what your name means to a visitor who types it without a path, and everything else you build has to live in a subfolder of that thing or on a subdomain beside it.

So if you put the storefront on the root, your name resolves to a shop. That is a completely coherent identity, and for many creators it is the accurate one: the products are the business, and a separate marketing site would be a project nobody asked for. If instead you already have a site you care about, or you know you will want a blog you control, the root is already spoken for and the storefront belongs beside it.

There is a third case worth naming honestly. Some people choose a subdomain because they are not yet sure they will keep selling, and the root feels like a commitment. That is a fine reason too, as long as you know it is the reason. You can always start on your free store.fan link, keep the domain unpointed and decide later; see pricing for what changes when you move up to Pro.

The two options, side by side

Read down whichever column matches what you already own, rather than whichever sounds more impressive.

How to decide in under ten minutes

Answer these in order and take the first clear signal. If you get to the end without one, choose the subdomain, because the reversible option wins ties.

1. 1Do you already have a website on this domain that you are keeping. If yes, subdomain. Stop here.
2. 2Do you have an email address on this domain that you rely on. If yes, you can still use either, but do the setup carefully and add records rather than replacing them.
3. 3In two years, do you expect a blog or portfolio you host yourself. If yes, subdomain, and let the root belong to that site.
4. 4Is your business the products, full stop, with no separate site in the plan. If yes, root domain.
5. 5Are you doing this for the first time and would prefer the setup with fewer ways to fail. If yes, subdomain.
6. 6Still undecided. Take the subdomain, because moving from a subdomain to the root later is a smaller job than clearing the root to make room for something else.

A worked example: the photographer with a portfolio

A wedding photographer already has a portfolio site on her root domain that brings in enquiries. She starts selling presets, a lighting course and a paid call slot on store.fan, and points shop.hername.com at the storefront. The portfolio keeps the root and keeps its enquiries. The shop link goes in her bio and her enquiry auto-reply, and the two sites do different jobs without arguing over the same address.

Her friend, an illustrator, has no site at all and no intention of making one. He puts the storefront on the root, because for him a separate marketing site would be a page describing products that are already one scroll below. The storefront carries the cover photo, the bio, the link cards and all ten product types on one page, which is what a marketing site would have been anyway. Same feature set, two architectures, both correct.

The mistake most people make

They pick the root because it looks more serious, then six months later decide they want a proper home page, and now the storefront is squatting on the address the home page needs. What follows is exactly the migration you were trying to avoid, with the added irony of doing it to yourself. The status a bare domain confers is smaller than you think and the flexibility you gave up is larger. Decide from what you will build, not from how it reads in a bio. If you want to see what the storefront already does before you weigh a separate site against it, the features overview is the fastest way to find out.

Write one sentence describing what you expect to own on this domain in two years. Whichever option that sentence points at is your answer, and you can close the tab knowing the next thing you build will have somewhere to go.