I ran an audit on my portfolio site recently. The kind where you step back and look at what the site is actually doing, not what you think it’s doing.
What I found was simple: it was doing two things at once, and doing both worse as a result.
The problem
I had been running andrewbackhouse.design as my web design portfolio – work I do for small businesses across Harrogate and North Yorkshire. I have been doing this professionally since 2015. But alongside the web design case studies, I had a lot of content about typography and web typography specifically. Technical stuff. Detailed. Important to me, but not what most visitors were looking for.
Someone would land on the site interested in a WordPress build for their business, see typographer content mixed in, and the message got diluted. The signal wasn’t clear. I was sending them in two directions at once.
Conversion got weaker. The site felt muddled. An agency would come looking for a typographer and get tangled up in WordPress sales. A small business would find typography work and wonder if they were in the right place.
The split
So I moved all the typography stuff to webtypographysolutions.com – a specialist site focused entirely on web type. It is a cleaner offering. Deeper. More useful for people who actually want to dig into type and how it works on the web.
That left andrewbackhouse.design clean. It is now just the web design work. WordPress sites for small businesses. Case studies. The actual service I have been offering since 2015.
I was not sure whether to keep some of it shared – to use one domain and just separate the sections more carefully. But keeping them together meant every visitor would still see both. The dilution would still be there, just organised better. What I needed was for people to find what they actually came for without distraction.
Splitting into two domains meant each site could have its own focus, its own messaging, its own audience. No compromise.
What happened
It is early – too early for solid metrics to tell the real story. But the immediate feeling is right. Each site has a clearer purpose. The messaging does not fight itself. Someone looking for WordPress web design work finds exactly that. Someone interested in typography finds depth and specificity. And the confusion is gone.
What I would tell someone else
If you are running multiple offerings on one site and you notice the signal getting fuzzy – if people seem uncertain which part of your work they are looking at – that is probably worth listening to. An audit that shows dilution is usually showing you something real.
But here is what matters: split if it solves a problem, not because you think you should. I split because visitors were getting confused and my conversion was weakening. That was clear. If one site is working fine and your different offerings complement each other, bundling is fine. But if they are pulling in different directions, splitting gives each thing room to breathe.
The practical bit: make sure what stays on your main site is actually your main business. Do not split off your speciality work and keep the secondary stuff on your primary domain. For me, web design is what I do day-in day-out. Typography is something I care about deeply, but it lives separately now. That clarity helps everyone.
