Domains and going live

Every new site answers on its dev domain, such as northwind-bakery.dev.example.com. Going live adds the customer’s domains and makes the first one the site’s address. Visitors keep reaching the site the whole time.

The Go live dialog with a customer domain entered

Before you start

Point each domain at the site’s server: an A record for the bare domain and one for www. With a Cloudflare token, the panel can create them for you.
Take a backup if the site already has content. Going live rewrites URLs in the database.

Go live

Open the site and choose Go live →.
Under Production domains (first = primary), enter the domains, for example northwindbakery.example www.northwindbakery.example.
Leave Keep the dev hostname as a 301 redirect on, so old links still arrive.
Optional: switch on Point them at this server through Cloudflare. It appears when the panel has a Cloudflare token.
Choose Go live, and follow the job’s log in the dialog.

Change the domains later

On the site’s Settings tab, edit Domains (first = primary) and choose Update domains. The steps are the same as going live. A new first domain rewrites the URLs in the database again.

What happens

The panel runs one job. It checks each domain’s DNS and warns when a domain does not point at the server yet. It then serves the old and new addresses side by side while Traefik gets a certificate for the new ones. It waits up to 90 seconds for the new address to answer over HTTPS. A slow certificate is a warning, and Traefik keeps trying.

Then the new first domain becomes the site’s address. WordPress’s home and siteurl change, and wp search-replace rewrites the old address in every table. The site’s recipes run again for the new address, so licensed plugins are activated for it. A stopped site is started for this step and stopped again.

If a step fails, the old addresses keep working and the job says what went wrong. Running the change again repairs it.

Limits

At most ten domains per site, and a domain belongs to one site.
The panel checks DNS but does not wait for it. A domain that points elsewhere gets no certificate until its record is fixed.
The Cloudflare option only reaches zones in the account the token belongs to. Other domains need their records created by hand.
Going live does not let search engines in. A new site starts with Discourage search engines from indexing this site ticked. Untick it in WordPress under Settings → Reading.