Is your website installed in a subdirectory?

Monday, September 30th, 2019

Why would anyone ever install a website in a subdirectory – and then leave it that way?  It’s not good news.  Typically, your website domain will look something like www.YourWebsiteDomainName.com. If it looks something like www.YourWebsiteDomainName.com/site, you have reason to be worried.  This typically indicates that your “website designer” has no clue what they’re doing.  When you create a website you typically will have an offsite or working version of the website.  Whether this is located in a different directory, domain, or server.  The designer will work on this website while your other website is live so the transition from old website to new website is seamless.  So, in this case, your “website designer” created your new website in a subdirectory and when it came time for the site to go live – they had no idea how to move it from that subdirectory to the main directory.  By leaving the website in the subdirectory www.YourWebsiteDomainName.com/site instead of the main directory www.YourWebsiteDomainName.com that is now your new website address. Then to top it off in an attempt to fix it or cover it up, they often will redirect the main domain to the subdirectory.  Doing this will affect your search engine rankings negatively, it looks terrible for promotional purposes (“go to www.YourWebsiteDomainName.com/site to see my website”) and has so many other negative repercussions.

So why would they do that?  They have no clue what they’re doing, that’s why.  For a custom website it’s simply a matter of removing the old files in the main directory and moving or replacing those files with the new ones. WordPress is more complicated as there’s a specific process and order to moving the files and database, it’s not rocket science, but it needs to be done correctly.  Due to this, some “website designers” decide that rather then doing it right and moving the files where they need to be, since they don’t know how to do it, they’ll just leave it as is.

If you are reading this thinking – this is what my website domain looks like, then at least you are now hopefully aware of why.  Now that you know, the next question you should be asking is – is my “website designer” even a website designer? Or are they someone that gave themself that title and has no idea what they’re doing.  And if something so obvious is wrong with your website, what else is?

We see situations like this more often then we would like.  So we hope that by sharing this information that you can help yourself, or someone else, spot when the person they are working with that they think is a “website designer” is truly not.