Considerations for Enhanced Domains
Before you enable and deploy enhanced domains, understand the prerequisites. Learn about how URLs, including public-facing URLs, change across your org with enhanced domains. Review recommendations for preserving access to your org during the change, learn about redirections, and understand how enhanced domains improve your Experience Cloud sites.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
Enforcement
Enhanced domains were enforced in Winter ’24. For more information, see Enhanced Domains Timeline.
The information in this topic is designed to assist customers who continue to test after deploying enhanced domains.
Plan Your My Domain Change
When you deploy enhanced domains, the URLs that Salesforce hosts for your org change. These changes require planning, coordination, and testing. For high-level steps, recommendations, and checklists, see Plan for a My Domain Change.
Preserve Access to Your Org
When you deploy enhanced domains, the login URLs for your sites change. Your My Domain login URL changes when you deploy enhanced domains in a sandbox. Enhanced domains don’t change your My Domain login URL in production unless you also change your My Domain name or suffix.
When your My Domain login URL or site URL changes, authentication methods such as SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA) can stop working. Before you deploy a change to your My Domain, preserve access for your users and admins.
URL Changes
When you deploy enhanced domains, all URLs across your org contain your company-specific My Domain name, including Experience Cloud sites and Salesforce sites. Also, your URLs don’t change when your org is moved to another Salesforce instance.
If your org was created before October 2020, you didn’t get a My Domain by default. In that case, your users accessed Salesforce with URLs that contained your instance name but not your My Domain name. If you hard-coded any of those old URLs in your org, update them to the enhanced domain format.
For a full list of enhanced domain URL formats and tables listing the changed formats when you deploy enhanced domains, see My Domain URL Formats.
Because your org’s URLs change, we recommend that you test your org’s functionality in a sandbox with enhanced domains before you deploy this feature in production. Pay particular attention to customizations that reference your old URLs. Note the changes required to complete successful tests, then use that list when deploying your My Domain with enhanced domains in production. For more information and guidance on the areas to update, see Update Your Org and Test My Domain Changes.
Differences Between Sandbox and Production
When you deploy enhanced domains, your production My Domain login URL format,
MyDomainName.my.salesforce.com, doesn’t change
unless you also change your My Domain name or suffix. However, many other URLs change.
When you enable enhanced domains in a sandbox, the word “sandbox” is added to all My Domain
URLs, including the org’s My Domain login URL:
MyDomainName--SandboxName.sandbox.my.salesforce.com.
Similarly, the URL for your Lightning pages also changes in a sandbox, but not in
production.
Therefore, some changes are required in your sandbox to test enhanced domains that aren’t required in production unless you also change your My Domain name or suffix. The changes that apply only when your My Domain login URL changes are called out on Update Your Org for My Domain Changes. If you deploy enhanced domains in production without changing your My Domain name or suffix, those tasks don’t apply.
Changes to Public-Facing URLs
When you deploy enhanced domains, the URLs for your Experience Cloud sites and Salesforce Sites change. With enhanced domains, these URLs include your My Domain name. For this change, there are two important considerations.
- Your My Domain name is now externally exposed. If Experience Cloud sites or Salesforce
Sites are enabled, the default Salesforce URL contains your My Domain name. For example,
MyDomainName.my.site.comfor Experience Cloud sites. If your current My Domain name reflects an internal-only brand, you have two options.- (Recommended.) Use a custom domain such as www.externalbrandname.com to serve the Experience Cloud site or Salesforce Site. For more information, see Custom Domains.
- Rename your My Domain so that it reflects your external brand when you deploy enhanced domains. Renaming your My Domain changes your login URL and other URLs that Salesforce hosts for your org.
- These URLs can be used outside of Salesforce. Identify all locations where these public-facing URLs are used. For example, a site URL can be used on your website, social media pages, marketing materials, and templates, such as email signatures and automated responses. Then create a plan to update each location and announce the change to your users and customers.
Redirection of Non-Enhanced My Domain URLs
Before you deploy enhanced domains, consider the impact on any existing My Domain host name redirections.
Salesforce only redirects your last set of previous My Domain URLs. If you previously changed your My Domain, your previous My Domain URLs redirect to your current My Domain URLs unless you disable those redirects. When you deploy another change to your My Domain, including enabling enhanced domains, existing redirections stop, and Salesforce redirects the My Domains in place before the latest deployment instead.
After you deploy enhanced domains, your previous non-enhanced host names are redirected. In sandboxes, Developer Edition orgs, patch orgs, scratch orgs, and Trailhead Playgrounds, Salesforce stopped those redirections in Winter ’25. In production orgs and demo orgs, redirections for non-enhanced My Domain URLs stop in Spring ’26. For details on the changes related to these redirections and your options in each release, see Enhanced Domains Timeline.
To see if redirects are in place for a previous My Domain, check the Redirections section of the My Domain page.
For more information on redirections, how to determine which My Domain host names are being redirected for your org, and which redirections for previous non-enhanced host names are temporary, see My Domain Redirections.
Experience Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN)
When you deploy enhanced domains, the format of your Experience Cloud site URL changes from
ExperienceCloudSitesSubdomainName.force.com to
MyDomainName.my.site.com. Your
*.my.site.com domain includes the Experience Cloud Content Delivery
Network (CDN). The Experience Cloud CDN reduces the page load time and provides availability
features for your Experience Cloud sites. For more information, see Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Salesforce.
This change requires some adjustments to your configuration. For details, see Update Your Org for My Domain Changes.
If you disable enhanced domains, your Experience Cloud site URL reverts to its previous
ExperienceCloudSitesSubdomainName.force.com format
and it no longer uses the Experience Cloud CDN. Disabling enhanced domains can require
reversing the updates outlined on Update Your Org for My Domain Changes.
Testing Packaged-Delivered Functionality
AppExchange is the Salesforce marketplace, offering thousands of solutions and services that extend Salesforce. Through AppExchange, Salesforce and our partners offer those solutions through packages. Often those packages include functionality that references your org’s URLs. For example, a package-delivered Visualforce page can contain links to sites, content, or other Visualforce pages. In most cases, you can’t edit those package-delivered components. If you update one of those components, a future package update can overwrite your changes.
We recommend that package developers use relative paths or dynamically generated host names to build links. If they follow that approach, updated links work after a My Domain change, such as enabling enhanced domains. However, it’s possible that a package developer included a hard-coded link in their package. If you find an issue with components or functionality delivered by a package, contact the package developer. Make them aware of the issue so that they can publish a new version of their package that works with enhanced domains and partitioned domains.
Third-Party Cookie Errors
Enhanced domains comply with browser settings that block third-party cookies, otherwise known as cross-site resources. However, in certain scenarios, you can still see errors related to cross-domain and third-party cookies in Salesforce, even when enhanced domains are deployed.
To avoid these errors, we recommend that you use Lightning Experience. Also, let your users know that they can receive a warning that requires them to open the page in another tab or window, especially on older Setup pages.
For more information on the conditions that can cause these errors, see Why Enhanced Domains.
Disable Enhanced Domains
Now that enhanced domains have been enforced, you can’t disable the feature.
Potential Impact
If enhanced domains aren’t deployed in your Salesforce org before Salesforce deploys the feature for you, here are some issues that can arise.
- Users can experience errors when attempting to access Salesforce, including but not limited to Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, and Visualforce pages.
- Some embedded content stored in Salesforce no longer appears.
- Third-party applications can lose access to your data.
- Single sign-on integrations with sandboxes can fail.
- Single sign-on integrations with orgs using the *.cloudforce.com and *.database.com domain suffixes can fail.
For more information about the issues you can encounter, see Troubleshoot Common Errors Related to Enhanced Domains.
To avoid these issues, we recommend that you test and deploy enhanced domains in a sandbox and deploy enhanced domains in production before Salesforce deploys the feature for you. For more information about what happens in each release, see Enhanced Domains Timeline.
