Taking Your Site Live

You're ready to take your new site live and with it move your online presence forward. Great!

There are a couple of things you'll need to do and if you need assistance let us know.

Please know, updating your DNS settings can take hours to fully take effect though often it's quite quick.

Preparing to Update DNS Settings

First, we need to make a minor adjustment in our software to accept requests from your domain and to allow Google to crawl the site so let us know when you're preparing to update your DNS settings.

When we make our change your temporary url (yourtemp.locable.com) will no longer work and thus you won't be able to update your site until your domain resolves.

Recommended: Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDNs help improve site performance and while we use a CDN with our software you can add another layer. We recommend Cloudflare - they have a free service level which is quite useful and allows you to secure your site while speeding it up.

In addition to the performance benefits, they also have very good domain management capabilities so if your domain is managed by a provider with limited options this could be valuable.

Start by creating your Cloudflare account

Visit https://www.cloudflare.com/a/sign-up, they'll walk you through a process and import in your current domain settings (it's like magic and takes about 1-minute).

Nothing will actually happen, however, until you change your name servers to point to Cloudflare (they provide you with 2 nameservers to use, use both). We recommend you do this right away, site visitors won't see any change at this point but it will give you more control.

If you need help with anything, let us know. We realize most people have no idea about this stuff.

When you're ready to go live

First, see note above about Preparing to Update DNS Settings

To start making changes, click DNS option (3rd blue box from the left) and create (or edit) a CNAME for www to point to locable-production.herokuapp.com - see below.

You will need to delete the CNAME for www (if it exists). The A record for @ can be edited or replaced, simply point it to "192.0.2.0"

Note, if anything of the records shows "Points to @" you'll want to edit it to point to the IP address in the @ Value i.e instead of pointing at @ it'll point directly to the IP address - see below.

Now that the CNAME is added, we need to add a forward so if someone types in yourdomain.com they actually end up at www.yourdomain.com

To do this, first click Page Rules in the options at the top:

The click Create Page Rule, you need 1 rule as follows (notice we're using gmlaurel.com as an example).

In the first box type yourdomain.com/* - using your real domain. Then click the drop-down box and select Forwarding URL, you want to use a 301 Permanent Redirect.

In the box type, https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 - the www and trailing $1 are important. Then save.

Technically, your site is live though it may take a little time to update for you.

One last task for good measure, let's make the site secure!

Click on Crypto in the options at the top.

You'll specifically want to select the Full option in the SSL section then turn on the always use HTTPS option.

Recommended settings:

Enable Bot Fight Mode in the Security > Bots section
Enable Auto Minify check boxes, Brotli, and Rocket Loader in the Speed > Optimization section
Enable Crawler Hints in the Caching > Configuration section and enable Tiered Caching in Caching > Tiered Caching

Check your site by visiting https://www.yourdomain.com (notice https not http), assuming it's resolving to our servers you'll see one of two options (if it's not resolving you just need to wait).

If you don't get the Secure view above it means something on your site is trying to load an image or content using http:// - the fastest option is to just ask us to look and we can make a quick fix.

Phew...

One more option with Cloudflare, you can speed up your site a smidge by clicking the Speed page then check the Auto Minify options. Paid accounts give you a few more options to speed things up a little.

All done.

This is important for SEO and required by our cloud hosting service. This must be set at the DNS level as there is no htaccess or other similar file to redirect once the traffic hits our servers.

All Done

With that, your domain will point to our servers and your new site will go live. You'll need to login again with the new URL in place, but your prior username and password are unchanged, and you can continue posting content.

Note: you don't have to use the CDN but making the site secure is important and this is the best (in some cases, only) way to do that.