How To Configure a Custom Domain for Your Community

If you are using Salesforce Community, you can change the community URL to be your branded URL. For example, when you create a community on Salesforce, by default the URL is going to be something like <name>.force.com or let’s say asagarwal.force.com. But you can change this to customers.asagarwal.com or whatever that you want it to be as long as you own that domain. And it is really simple to achieve this (say about 10-15 minutes effort or less)

For example, let’s say that you have defined a community in Salesforce and your default Salesforce Community URL is https://asagarwal.force.com/customers as shown below

(You can click on these images to enlarge)

Now the customers will need to use the URL https://asagarwal.force.com/customers to go to this community, as shown below. Well this is okay but not great. We can do better here.

To change this URL to something more branded, you will need to add a CNAME or a TXT record to your domain settings. To get the value for the CNAME/TXT record,  navigate to Setup (in Salesforce) -> Domains -> Add a Domain

And copy the value that is shown on the screen. For example “[domain].00xxxxxxxxxxxxxxak.live.siteforce.com“. Replace the value of [domain] to the branded domain that you want to set the value to. For me it will be “customers.asagarwal.com.00xxxxxxxxxxxxxxak.live.siteforce.com“

Now, navigate to DNS settings of your domain and add a CNAME or a TXT record pointing to the value copied above

And then navigate back to Salesforce and add the domain record. If you try to complete this step without adding the CNAME / TXT record in your DNS settings, you are going to get an error

Once added, Salesforce will provision the custom domain for your Community. Wait for Salesforce to complete this step (i.e. the status will change from ‘Provisioning’ to ‘Completed’. This may take a few hours (in my case it took about 5-6 hours)

Now, all we need to do is to map this domain to the specific community in Salesforce. Navigate to Setup -> Custom URL -> New Custom URL

Select the custom Domain and the specific community to map the two and click save

Check if provisoning has completed for custom domain and activate the custom domain. This may take another 10-15 minutes to complete

That’s it. Now share your branded URL (‘customers.asagarwal.com‘ in my case) with your customes, sit back and gloat about it 🙂