Note! Custom Storefront domains are currently in closed beta; but you can contact our Customer Success team, if you wish to use participate.
Preparing your domain
The first thing you need to do, is to decide which domain you want to use for your Storefront. You can use either the root domain (ie. yourdomain.com), or a subdomain (ie. book.yourdomain.com).
Whether you wish to use the root domain or a domain, depends on your needs. If, for instance, you already have a website on your root domain that you wish to keep, then you have to pick a subdomain to use.
Once you have chosen your domain, the next thing is to determine whether it's already in use, and need to be "moved", or if it's a brand new domain. In case it's a brand new domain, you can skip the next section.
If you want to move/reuse an existing (sub)domain, the first thing you want to do, is to log into your DNS (Domain Name Service) provider and change the TTL (Time-To-Live). The TTL value is the amount of time which the DNS records are "stored" on servers around the world. Generally, your TTL would be expected to be anywhere between 1 hour and 24 hours.
The first thing to do, is to locate the current A- or CNAME-records set up for the domain, you wish to use. On existing domains, there should only be one record, either A or CNAME.
Change the TTL on that row the the lowest value possible - preferably 10 minutes or lower.
The reason for doing this, is to force servers to store the existing values for less time, and thus force updates to go through faster. It's recommended to then wait for at least the original amount of hours, before making additional changes - as mentioned, this can be anywhere from 1 hour to 24 hours (or more).
Start the process
Now that your domain is prepared, contact our Customer Success team using the chat, in your Backoffice. Tell them which domain you wish to use, as your new custom domain.
From here on out, our team will configure your account to use the new domain. This configuration should be done before any changes to DNS, if you're moving an existing domain, to ensure that your Storefront will be available on the original Understory domain, while we make the change.
If you're configuring a brand new domain, you can go ahead and add new records right away.
Update your DNS
The DNS should be updated to point to our servers, such that your Storefront will correctly respond to your domain.
If you're setting up a subdomain, go ahead and add a CNAME record with the value of _cname.understory.io.
If you wish to use your root domain, for instance mydomain.com, you possibly won't be able to set up a CNAME record.
Depending on whether your DNS provider support "CNAME Flattening" or not, you can either set up an ALIAS-record or a CNAME-record.
Activating the domain
Once you have updated your DNS, send us a message using the chat within your Backoffice. After this has been done, our team will verify when your DNS settings have propagated across the servers around the world, and finally activate the domain on your storefront.
When your Storefront domain is activated, we will automatically set up redirects from your Understory domain to the custom domain, so any links you've set up in other locations will still work. However, it is good practice to update the links to point to the new custom domain, for SEO purposes.