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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. Add your domain or domains to Formsort to generate the CNAME records

  2. Add Formsort-generated CNAME records to your domain hosting provider

  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 setting a few links up front may save you time later.

  1. In your Studio navigate to Domains > Hostnames

  2. Click SET UP DOMAINS… button.

  3. Enter the subdomain you have chosen. Use + Add another domain if you wish to add multiple.

  4. Once all your subdomains are added, Click Next.

  5. Navigate to 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 each new domain you’ve provided - if you don’t see all of them, make sure to refresh:

  • a verification record, to prove ownership of the domain.

  • a mapping record associated with the specific subdomain you’ve requested (e.g. onboarding.yourdomain.com). This points traffic on your domain to the Formsort flow.

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. Create a new custom record at your hosting provider for both the mapping and verification records. The records you create will be CNAME type. For many hosting providers, the name and value should match exactly what is generate in Formsort. It's recommended to set a TTL (Time To Live) anywhere between 5 minutes to 1 hour.

If your DNS has a CAA record, you will need to make sure that you authorize AWS - Formsort's certificate provider - to issue wildcard SSL certificates.

This generally requires you to add a CAA record for the root domain at your DNS with "issuewild awstrust.com". Please read more on this at AWS, and check your provider-specific instructions on adding CAA records. As an example, if you are trying to set up a domain like signup.example.com, the root example.com will need a CAA record, not signup.

2. Periodically refresh the DNS page in Formsort until the "Status" indicator shows a green dot. This means the DNS has successfully accepted the records, and your domain now points to Formsort.

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 guidelines

The conventions for adding records to your domain name service may vary slightly from provider to provider. Be sure to follow your provider-specific guidelines for adding records.

For example, Google Domains and Google Cloud DNS already imply the domain in the DNS Name field, when creating a CNAME record. Thus, for a domain subdomain.domain.com, only subdomain would be entered.

Reference: https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/tutorials/create-domain-tutorial#set-up-domain

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.

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