How do I manage many domains for branded or per-city websites?

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This decision is easy to make without thinking about it (just register a new domain for each new city or location) and hard to walk back once you've got a dozen separate domains each needing their own renewal, DNS setup and certificate. Deciding the structure deliberately before you're ten locations deep saves real ongoing effort.

Subdomains versus genuinely separate domains

A subdomain setup (dubai.yourbrand.com, london.yourbrand.com) means one root domain, one DNS configuration, and critically, one wildcard SSL certificate that automatically covers every subdomain you add, present and future, with no extra certificate work per location. Netlify, a platform that hosts websites and issues their SSL certificates as part of that hosting, specifically requires Netlify DNS to issue that wildcard certificate, which is worth knowing if you're planning this structure, since it means your domain's DNS needs to actually be managed through Netlify, not just pointed at it, for the wildcard coverage to kick in.

A genuinely separate domain per location (yourbrand-dubai.com, yourbrand-london.com) means each one is its own registration, its own DNS setup, and its own certificate, all of which you repeat for every new location. It's not that this is hard, each individual setup is straightforward, it's that the effort scales linearly with the number of locations, and so does your annual renewal bill if you're buying each domain separately.

Why you might still want separate domains anyway

Local SEO is the honest reason businesses often still choose separate domains despite the extra management overhead: a domain name that itself contains a city or service area can carry a little extra local relevance in some searches, and some businesses want each location to feel like its own fully independent brand presence rather than visibly part of a franchise or network structure. Neither of these is wrong, but they're a genuine trade against the ongoing management cost, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which one actually matters for your specific business before defaulting to "separate domains because that's what feels official."

Step by step: setting up a subdomain structure for new locations

1. Move your domain's DNS to be managed where your sites are hosted (for example, Netlify DNS if that's your platform), since this is the prerequisite for the wildcard certificate that will cover every subdomain automatically.
2. Set up your first one or two locations as subdomains and confirm the wildcard SSL is actually covering them without you doing anything per-subdomain.
3. Template the setup so adding location fifteen is close to a copy-paste of adding location three: the same site structure, the same deployment process, just a new subdomain and new local content.
4. Add new locations as subdomains going forward, confirming each one resolves and loads securely before considering it live.

If you're already a dozen domains deep on the separate-domain structure and want to consolidate to subdomains, that's a genuine migration project, not a quick switch, since you'd be redirecting established domains and potentially affecting whatever search ranking they've already built individually. Worth doing deliberately with a developer rather than rushing it.

A practical limit worth knowing about

If you're managing DNS for a genuinely large number of domains or records, Netlify's own documentation notes there's no support for inbound DNS zone transfers, meaning you can't bulk-import an existing large DNS record set from another provider in one move; you'd be recreating records individually or in smaller batches. For a team managing dozens of locations with existing, complex DNS setups elsewhere, this is worth confirming directly before committing to a migration, since it affects how much manual work the move itself takes.

What I'd actually tell a franchise network or an agency managing client sites

For a genuine multi-location brand where every site shares the same core template with local content swapped in, subdomains are almost always the right call, and I'd push back on separate domains unless there's a specific, provable local SEO or branding reason that outweighs the ongoing management cost. For an agency managing many separate clients, each client legitimately wants their own domain, since they're different businesses, not locations of the same one, so the subdomain structure doesn't apply the same way; the real lever there is templating your deployment process so adding a new client's domain is fast and repeatable, even though each one is genuinely separate.

A worked example: a service franchise expanding to twelve cities

A home services franchise started with three separate domains, one per founding location, each registered and set up independently without much thought since three felt manageable by hand. Growth plans called for expanding to twelve cities within two years, and the owner initially assumed they'd just repeat the same process nine more times.

Running the math on that assumption changed the decision quickly: nine more domain registrations, nine more SSL setups, nine more annual renewal dates to track, versus one subdomain structure where adding a new city meant creating a new subdomain under an existing wildcard certificate, with zero additional certificate work per location. The franchise moved its domain's DNS to be managed where its sites were hosted, got the wildcard certificate working, and migrated the three existing locations over, accepting a short-term SEO cost on those three domains in exchange for a vastly simpler path for the nine still to come. By location eight, adding a new city was close to a template copy-paste, new subdomain, new local content, same deployment process, rather than a fresh standalone project each time.

A practical note on deciding per market, not company-wide

Some businesses genuinely benefit from a mixed approach rather than picking one structure for every location. A few flagship markets where the local-SEO argument for a standalone domain is strong and provable, backed by real competitive research, not just a hunch, might justify their own separate domains, while the bulk of smaller or newer locations roll out as subdomains under the main brand. This isn't indecision, it's matching the structure to where the extra management cost of a separate domain actually pays for itself versus where it's just added overhead with no real upside.

How I'd approach this

When a client is scaling past a handful of locations, I always raise the subdomain-versus-separate-domain decision early and explicitly, before we've even set up hosting, because it's one of those choices that's cheap to make correctly on day one and genuinely expensive to unwind later once a dozen separate domains each have their own history, backlinks and renewal dates. If you're past that point already and the management overhead has become a real burden, I can help plan a deliberate migration to a simpler structure, weighing what you'd actually lose (and what you wouldn't) against what you'd gain in ongoing simplicity.