Will creating and activating a custom Domain have any immediate impacts on any communities/existing sites?

Question

(Personal Disclaimer in case this question is obvious/stupid)

I had a rough experience with creating a Community and an unexpected redirect (in Production) and Support with Salesforce went on for two weeks with NO valuable feedback or information, so I want to avoid anything unexpected/irreversible since I can't rely on support.

Furthermore, custom Domains need to be done in Production, as they are not supported in dev orgs, which is another reason why I need to be sure of what my impacts are before proceeding

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So! Domains >> New Domain >> I have a CNAME set up and all that jazz, I just need to hit save and activate. This doesn't automatically change the URL for my communities, right? That would be done manually? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm just very skeptic of Salesforce with Domains from the last 2 weeks on the struggle bus. I want to confirm that nothing will automatically happen just by creating this domain.

Bonus question... if I assign this Domain to a Site using Custom URLs, this too does not change any other communities/site URLs, right?

Thank you!

Answer 1

If I am getting your question, you already have a community setup and that your community has a URL say https://xyz.force.com/mycommunity and that you want to now utilize custom "Domain" to redirect to your community. If this is the right understanding, then as for your question:

This doesn't automatically change the URL for my communities, right? That would be done manually?

The answer to this is Yes.

Creating a domain itself does not impact your existing (or any new) community urls. This establishes that your Salesforce sites can now be redirected through the domain that you have setup (only when the CNAME is updated and is available across the internet). What you additionally need is to create "Custom URLs" so that your new domain can redirect to the appropriate community hosted on that domain. Refer to the below excerpt from the help article:

To host one or more sites on a domain, you must set up custom URLs for each site. Custom URLs uniquely distinguish the sites within that domain. Let’s say you have a domain called www.ourdomain.com and you want to host two sites called siteone and sitetwo. You create custom URLs by associating ourdomain.com to each site using a custom path. This results in two custom URLs: http://www.ourdomain.com/siteone and http://www.ourdomain.com/sitetwo. When web users access the domain using one of the URLs, the custom path determines which site within the domain they see.

For your bonus question:

Bonus question... if I assign this Domain to a Site using Custom URLs, this too does not change any other communities/site URLs, right?

The answer again is Yes. The communities still exist to continue with their specific URLs, but if you have a custom URL defined, it just lets you access the same community over the internet using the CNAME for your domain.

You can also find more details on how the custom domain works on this help article which explains how redirection works to the underlying community (which still has its unique url intact as defined in Salesforce).

Hope this helps.