You finished designing your landing page and have connected your first subdomain, but now you think you will need to publish a few pages for several campaigns, and you are wondering what the best way to go about it would be. This article aims to help you with that decision by talking about some best practices regarding URLs within the context of our platform.
Useful related articles:
1. How do I publish my page to my own domain? https://d.pr/JmYjm3
2. Publishing on a custom domain (CNAME) https://d.pr/AC6ECg
3. How do I use subdirectories? https://d.pr/iMHeUZ
Your Instapage subscription comes with a limit to the number of subdomains that you can connect to your account. The limit applies only to landing pages published via CNAME, all other publishing options won't count towards your total limit. Each plan may have a different limit, so please check inside Account Admin > Subscription to see your own (note that team members do not have access to this section).
If your limit is two subdomains like the screenshot above, you would want to give them a broader name that would fit multiple campaigns and your general brand, such as get, play, go, buy, engage, lp, new. If you have a higher limit, you can give them more specific names and choose one subdomain per campaign or product, etc.
Subdirectories are not limited; you can add them for each page on the publishing screen, meaning you can personalize the URL more through them rather than the subdomain.
How to set a URL in Instapage
You decide what the URL of a page is when you go to the publishing screen. That will prompt you to select a subdomain you previously connected and then decide the subdirectory by typing it in the dedicated text box.
Best practices
- The URL should match the content of the ad and the landing page.
- With readability in mind, two-word subdirectories are preferred over strings of numbers and symbols.
- Incorporate keywords. Just like you incorporate them into the copy of the page and image tags, keywords can help when placed in the URL.
- Keep it short. Readability is an important aspect to consider with URLs, and shorter ones are easier to read.
DO: https://get.ourproduct.com/happier-mornings
DON'T: https://get.ourproduct.com/coffee-machines/for-happier-and-easier-mornings
You can use subdirectories to differentiate your landing pages rather than relying on the subdomain to do that. For example, in the image below, the pages have the same subdomain, but the subdirectories give them separate identities.
Since each of our subscriptions comes with a subdomain limit for CNAME publishing, you can rely more on subdirectories to differentiate URLs while still keeping to the best practices outlined above or use the other publishing options like Wordpress, Drupal, or reverse proxy.