Get your Own Subdomain on Medium
Getting one step closer to becoming a Distinguished Writer with your medium.com subdomain in 4 simple steps
A few days ago, I was working and found an article related to GSOC on Medium. I was impressed by the writer’s work and wanted to see more of their work, so I went to their profile and saw a few articles. But all of a sudden, I noticed the domain I was at, it was rudrankriyam.medium.com.
It seemed much better than the usual URL for the profile. Then, I searched a bit on the internet and found out the procedure of getting my own subdomain, which in all fairness is pretty simple.
In this article, I’ll help you in getting your own subdomain on medium. I will also be discussing pros and cons of having a medium subdomain and whether you should have one or not.
Medium
So, probably I don’t have to explain this, but still lets have a look at what Medium is in their own books:
Medium is an open platform where readers find dynamic thinking, and where expert and undiscovered voices can share their writing on any topic.
It’s basically a publishing platform for your blogs and provides you with ample opportunities to reach a larger audience.
Subdomains
A subdomain is basically a prefix to a domain. Let’s take a look at how Wikipedia explains it:
In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is a part of another domain. For example, if a domain offered an online store as part of their website example.com, you might use the subdomain shop.example.com.
Another example is my own subdomain that you can look in the URL right now, singhshashank.medium.com. Here, singhshashank is the prefix and this is my subdomain which is a part of the medium.com domain.
Steps to getting your own Subdomain
You can get your own subdomain on medium by following these simple steps:
Step 1: Create Medium Profile
To start it all, you must first go to the Medium website by clicking on the link or the logo on the top left of this page. Create a new account or sign in with your own Medium credentials and create a new profile, choose a profile design, setup your account.
Step 2: Creating Story and Publishing
Next, you can click on “New Story” from your profile menu, write a new story and publish it without a publication. The important step here is to self publish it and not send it to any publications.
Step 3: Enter Subdomain
Afterwards, you’ll be prompted by Medium to enter a subdomain according to your choice, which basically will be the prefix to medium.com for your profile’s URL. You can enter your name or any subdomain name you like (depending upon availability, you can pre-check by entering the URL now, just put “medium.com/@name” in the URL, where name is your preferred subdomain name or simply by trying to change your username from settings).
Step 4: You have a subdomain
This is less of a step and more of an end, you now have a subdomain on Medium. Now, anyone can find you through your subdomain on the internet.
Pros & Cons of subdomains on Medium
We shall now discuss the pros and cons of having a subdomain on medium before finally coming to a conclusion if you should get a subdomain from Medium or not.
Pros
- It looks very pretty and gives a classy look to your blog. Between medium.com/@singhshashank (shashanksingh wasn’t available for me) and singhshashank.medium.com, I’d choose the latter anyday as it gives a feeling that I’m the owner of the domain even if I’m not.
- You can add it to your Resume/CV as your portfolio.
- As Medium doesn’t allow for custom domains at the time of writing this article, the next best way to customise Medium URLs is through having a subdomain.
- Another big advantage is that you get the subdomain for free, which actually looks better and much simpler.
Cons
The only and major drawback about it is when you consider the SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
A domain like medium.com would always have more traffic than a subdomain because it has a higher ranking, whereas your domain looks like a new website to the search engine and you basically start from the bottom.
This is a general problem for many, maybe one of the big reasons why they don’t want a subdomain. But, for someone like me who created a publication for their own articles (it helps in getting more insights for the stories) and publishes all the articles there, it seems good enough to have a subdomain.
As articles created in a publication (unless they have a custom domain like towardsdatascience.com) have “
medium.com/publication/title” as their URL, there is no effect on them.
Conclusion
As stated earlier, I like the way how the subdomain looks and for that reason I have opted for a subdomain, even if it is harmful for SEO. Although, I’ve found a way to nullify that through publishing all my articles to a publication, so that I can easily distribute my subdomain which certainly looks better.
Finally, it’s your choice whether to take a subdomain or not, but if you do want it, I’d advice you to do it quickly as you might lose out on your favoured subdomain as people make accounts everyday (in case you want a subdomain name different than your username).
