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Custom domains

Hosting a form at {subdomain}.yourdomain.com

Hosting under your own domain

By creating a Canonical Name record (CNAME) in your Domain Name System (DNS) records, you can instruct your URL to display your Formsort flows at [subdomain].yourdomain.com, or in paths under that domain.
This promotes responder trust, improves search engine indexing of your form, and avoids ad campaign rejection on services like Google Ads which may require campaign destination URLs to match your own domain.

What do you need?

  • Your own domain, registered at a registrar such as GoDaddy, Google Domains, or Namecheap
  • Admin access to your registrar (or access to someone who does) as you will need to add new DNS records

Overview of the process

  1. 1.
    Add your domain or domains to Formsort to generate the CNAME records
  2. 2.
    Add Formsort-generated CNAME records to your domain hosting provider
  3. 3.
    Map formsort flows (or variants) to each of the domains

Step 1: Add your domain or domains to Formsort

First, decide which subdomain you would like to host your flows. Examples would be beyond.infinity.com, survey.platform.com, quiz.abc.com, survey.satisfaction.com, etc.
Most Formsort users have several subdomains mapped, either to facilitate multivariate testing or to be able to publish multiple flows for different use cases (e.g. `onboarding.yourdomain.com` and `accountclose.yourdomain.com`). While you can always add subdomains later, keep in mind that changes to domains take time to go live so having a few links at the outset may save you time later.
  1. 1.
    In the Studio navigate to Studio > Domains > Hostnames
  2. 2.
    Click SET UP DOMAINS… button.
  3. 3.
    Enter the subdomain you have chosen. Use + Add another domain if you wish to add multiple.
  4. 4.
    Once all your subdomains are added, Click Next.
  5. 5.
    Navigate to Studio > Domains > Hostnames > DNS tab

Step 2: Add DNS records to your domain hosting provider

After a few minutes, Formsort will generate at least two DNS records associated with the new domain you’ve provided (if you don’t see all of them, make sure to refresh).
In addition to the mapping record associated with the specific subdomain you’ve requested (e.g. onboarding.yourdomain.com), a verification record will be generated by our system as a means of proving that you own the domain. Add both the mapping record and the verification record to your domain hosting provider.
If your DNS have a CAA record (very uncommon), you will need to make sure that you authorize AWS (Formsort's provider) to issue wildcard SSL certificates. This generally requires you to add a CAA record with "issuewild awstrust.com". Please read more on this at AWS.
Once the verification and mapping records are generated, you have 3 days to add to your hosting provider. These records will expire after 72 hours. If this happens, please reach out to customer support team so we can delete the records for you to re-add.
  1. 1.
    Create a new custom record at your hosting provider for each of the records shown. The records you create will be CNAME type. For many hosting providers, the name and value should match exactly what is shown. Recommended is to set a TTL, a time to live, anywhere between 5 minutes to 1 hour. Note: The feedback takes a while. Make sure to refresh after 5 to 10 minutes.
The naming conventions in records creation vary slightly from provider to provider. See subsection 'Provider-specific Suggestions' below for more information.
2. Wait and refresh until the "Status" indicator shows a green dot.
You can move on to Step 3 now. While the DNS records may not have updated yet, mapping each domain to a flow will ensure that flows will be operational immediately once DNS updates complete.

Provider-specific Suggestions

Step 3: Map each domain to a flow or variant

For each of the subdomains, choose which flow or which variant of a flow should be hosted. Choosing a flow without specifying a variant will allow you to randomly send each responder to a variant of that flow, based on variant weighting.
Navigate to the Studio > Domains > Hostnames > Routing and click Edit on the domain you wish to map. Using the dropdown menu, select the flow and optionally the variant. Changes go live within a minute.
If mapping to a specific variant, it has to be published. In case of mapping to a flow with no variant specified, at least one variant within the flow needs to be published.

Setting default URL parameters on domains

You may want to append URL parameters to a domain. Toggle Default URL params on to open a text box that will allow you to write in the URL param.
This feature is commonly used to add environment parameters to domains that are used for staging and development environments, however a multitude of different parameters can be used.