A common ask from our customers around Salesforce Communities is: “I want my Community URL to look like my company’s brand.” As with most things Salesforce related, the answer is: “Yes, we can do that!” The even better news is that it’s relatively easy to do. Here are the key things you should know about how to customize your Community URL, both staying native and using a custom domain.
How to select your Salesforce Community URL
When you setup a new Community, you will select a shortened version of your community name that will be used in the out-of-the-box URL. Common names used are things like “partners” for a partner community or “support” for a self-service community. Salesforce uses the following structure for its base community URL:
- Production URL: https://mycompany.force.com/communityname/
- Sandbox URL: https://sandboxname-mycompany.csXX.force.com/communityname/
If you are using the Community Designer to build your community, you will see a /s/ appended to the end of the base URL before the Site.com page name, i.e. https://mycompany.force.com/communityname/s/pagename. If you are using Force.com to build your community, there will be no /s/. Read more here if you don’t know which tool to use for building your Salesforce Community.
While you can use the out-of-the-box URL, for branding and user experience purposes, many of our customers prefer to use a custom domain such as partners.constantcontact.com inside of their Salesforce Community. Using a custom domain is a big win for little effort, so we certainly recommend that customers go this path. To setup a custom domain, you will need to do two things:
- Ask your Salesforce administrator to add a custom domain in Salesforce
- Work with your website team to setup your domain and configure its CNAME
If you are already using a custom domain to point to a legacy portal, at go live, your website team will need to update the CNAME to point to the new Salesforce Community. It can take up to 24hrs for those updates to take place so it’s best to make the updates during a low traffic time. That said, we’ve seen the DNS changes happen almost instantaneously at all of our customers.
Awesome article Kara! Thanks for covering it!
One thing to keep in mind: to use a custom domain, you’ll need to buy an SSL certificate and configure your org & domain to use it.
Joe, that’s a great point. The Winter ’15 Release Notes cover this in depth for anyone curious to understand the process in greater detail.
is there anyway to get rid of the /s/ if using the community designer?
We are moving communities from one to the other, and don’t want to mess with seo, so we’re trying to get the url structure the same.
dealing with having categories in old structures (ie, FAQ, Troubleshooting.. etc) in the url path, but not in the new site. As well as /article/ on old site, and /articles/ on the new one.
Do you know if those items can be changed as well?
Unfortunately, you cannot get rid of the /s/. If you try to go to a case in the old URL structure, e.g. mycommunity.mycompany.com/500e1764376473, it will forward you to the new URL structure, e.g. mycommunity.mycompany.com/s/500e1764376473. For knowledge articles, if you are worried about existing articles that link to other articles, permitting that you linked them correctly, they should automatically link to articles with the proper URL for the template-based community.
Hi i have configured the custom url with http://www.customdomain.com
if we use url http://www.customdomain.com then it works fine and redirects to https://www but if we enter directly https://custom domain it takes us to the unsecure warning to proceed.
or if we use customdomain.com it redirects us to salesforce generic community page
Did you setup a SSL certificate?
Hi Kara,
Does a certificate needs to be setup in order to community.ourdomain.com does not change to community.force.com?
If you’re doing a custom domain for a community where someone will be logging in, you definitely want that SSL certificate uploaded or you’ll have issues. I think there are issues if you do a custom domain without a SSL certificate and someone hits https: instead of http: but it’s been years since I ran into that, so my memory is a big fuzzy. A basic rule of thumb would be to always upload a SSL certificate and things will work beautifully. This article covers this in more detail: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000212707&type=1