Ask an agency and you will usually be told the project needs its own website, on its own domain.
Sometimes that is right. Often it is right for reasons nobody states, and there is a real cost that nobody mentions either.
What does a separate microsite actually give you?
Three genuine advantages.
Focus. One project, one message, one form, no navigation offering six other projects. For paid traffic this matters, because a visitor who clicked an ad for one project should not be given a menu.
A domain that carries the project name. People search for the project by name once the hoardings go up, and a matching domain is easy to find and easy to say on a call.
Clean separation for handover. If the project is a joint venture, or the marketing will be handed to a channel partner, a separate site is much easier to give away than a section of your corporate website.
Those are real. None of them is the reason most microsites get built.
What is the cost nobody mentions?
Every microsite starts from zero in search.
A new domain has no history, no links and no authority. It takes months to rank for anything beyond the project name, and by then a fair share of the buying window has passed. Meanwhile your main developer site, which may have years of history and links, sits there not being used for the thing you are actually selling this year.
Then the project sells out, the domain renews for a few years, and eventually nobody pays for it. The links people shared break. Whatever authority it built is thrown away rather than accumulated.
Do that for six projects and you have six abandoned domains and a corporate site that never got stronger.
So when should the project sit on the main site?
When search matters more than focus.
If buyers in your city search things like three bedroom flats in a named area rather than by project name, that traffic goes to whoever has authority. A page at yourdeveloper.com/projects/name inherits everything the main domain has built, and every project you add makes the domain stronger rather than starting again.
It also compounds. Five projects on one domain, with the completed ones kept online as evidence, is a genuinely useful asset. Five separate microsites is five separate small things.
Can I have both?
Yes, and this is what I usually recommend for a serious launch.
The project lives on the main site as the permanent, indexable page, at yourdeveloper.com/projects/name. That is what search finds, what accumulates links, and what stays online after handover as proof of a completed project.
The microsite, if you want one, is a campaign landing page for paid traffic. Its job is conversion, not search. It never needs to rank, so its lack of authority costs nothing.
Then set the canonical tag on the microsite pointing at the main site page. That tells search engines which version is the real one and stops the two competing for the same terms, which is the failure mode when developers run both without thinking about it.
What about the project name as a domain?
Buy it, and point it at the main site page.
The domain is cheap, it stops a channel partner or a competitor registering it, and a redirect gives you the easy-to-say address without splitting your search presence. Someone typing projectname.com lands on your developer site, on the project page, with everything else you have built sitting behind it.
That gets you most of the benefit of a microsite for the cost of a domain registration.
What if the project is a joint venture?
Then a separate site is usually the right answer, and the reason is commercial rather than technical.
Shared ownership, shared marketing budgets and an eventual handover all get much simpler when the asset is separate. Trying to unpick a project section from a corporate site two years later, when the relationship has changed, is a conversation nobody enjoys.
Decide this at the start. It is an ownership question, not a marketing one.
What would I do by default?
Project page on the main developer site, always. That is the permanent asset.
Add a campaign landing page for paid traffic if the spend justifies it, with the canonical pointing home.
Buy the project domain and redirect it.
Keep completed projects online forever. A developer site showing four completed projects with photographs of finished buildings is worth more than any claim in any brochure, and it is the cheapest credibility available to you.
The instinct to build a fresh microsite for every launch feels like giving each project its due. In practice it means starting from nothing, six times over.
We build the project page on your main site first and treat the microsite as a campaign asset, so the search authority accumulates instead of being thrown away. Tell us what you are working on.
