Custom Domains in Salesforce

Note

Custom domains that serve your sites are unrelated to the Use Custom Domain option on the Salesforce login pages. For information about logging in with that option, see Troubleshoot Login Issues.

For information about including your company’s brand in a subdomain of the URLs that Salesforce hosts for your org, for example, https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com, see My Domain.

Unfamiliar with terms like DNS, CDN, and CNAME? Want to review the difference between a DNS resolver and a certificate? See Custom Domain Terminology.

Why Custom Domains

The primary reason to set up a custom domain is to provide a branded experience to your users. With a custom domain, your users access your external-facing Experience Cloud site or Salesforce Site and its functionality through your branded URL. Experience Cloud sites, include Digital Experiences built with Experience Cloud, Commerce, and Industries licenses.

Also, with the many-to-many relationship between sites and custom domains, you can serve your external-facing content to meet your branding needs. For example, you can serve content from multiple Experience Cloud sites on one parent website, or serve multiple sites on one domain through custom paths.

Custom domains are especially useful if you own multiple brands and want them to share content. For example, let’s say you have a parent company with two distinct brands. Each brand has its own registered domain, and you want each of those domains to serve the same parent website. You can use custom domains to point both brand domains to a single parent site with content from Salesforce.

Admins also benefit from custom domains. Because you can serve multiple sites on one domain, custom domains simplify the management of your domains and your corresponding network allowlists. And even if your system-hosted site URL changes due to a My Domain change, your custom domain remains constant, reducing the number of updates required.

Domains in Salesforce

Salesforce serves multiple domains for your org, including a login domain, such as MyDomainName.my.salesforce.com, and site domains that can end in *.force.com, *.my.site.com, or *.my.salesforce-sites.com. You can’t edit those Salesforce-managed domains, but you can add and manage custom domains from the Domains Setup page.

When you set up a domain in Salesforce, you specify the domain that you own, such as https://www.example.com, and select an HTTPS option to serve that domain. For example, you can route your domain through your own HTTPS certificate, through the Salesforce content delivery network (CDN) partner, or through a third-party CDN. Then, you point your domain to your site.

Custom URLs

Whether you use Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, or both solutions, your domains and sites can have a many-to-many relationship through custom URLs. Each domain can serve up to 200 sites, and each site can be associated with up to 500 domains. An Experience Cloud site counts as two sites, so if you use only Experience Cloud sites, each domain can serve 100 sites.

After you set up a custom domain for your org, you use Custom URLs to map your domain and its paths to specific sites. For each Custom URL, you specify the domain record, the site, and the path. For example, if you have one site, you create a custom URL to point your custom domain to that site for the root path (/).

With Custom URLs, you can also serve different sites via the same domain. For example, you own https://www.example.com, and you have Experience Cloud sites for your online store, customer service and job postings. You can set up three custom URLs, each with a different path: https://www.example.com/shop, https://www.example.com/help, and https://www.example.com/apply. When users access the domain using one of those URLs, the custom path determines which site they see.

For an example of the many-to-many relationship between sites, see Custom Domain Build Example.