Introduction to Salesforce Sites

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| By Webner

Salesforce Sites enables you to form public websites and applications that are directly integrated into your Salesforce organization—without requiring users to log in with a username and password. You can publicly expose any information stored in your organization through a branded URL of your choice, and make the site’s pages match the view and feel of your company’s brand.

Salesforce organizations contain valuable information about partners, solutions, products, users, ideas, and other business data. Some of this information would be useful to people outside your organization, but only users with the proper access and permissions can view and use it. In the past, to form this data available to the overall public, you had to line up an internet server, create custom sites (JSP, PHP, or other), and perform API integration between your site and your organization. Also, if you wanted to gather information employing a web form, you had to program your pages to perform data validation.

Salesforce sites are hosted on Lightning Platform servers, there are not any data integration issues. And because sites are built on native Visualforce pages, data validation on collected information is performed automatically. You can also enable users to register for or log in to an associated portal seamlessly from your public site.

The following examples illustrate a few ways in which you’ll use sites:

  • Create an ideas site—Use sites to host a public community forum for sharing and voting on ideas about your company, services, or products. Ideas websites can be made public using sites.
  • Publish a support FAQ—Provide helpful information on a public website where customers can look for solutions to their issues.
  • Create a store locator tool—Add a public tool to your portal that helps customers find stores in their area.
  • Publish an employee directory—Add an employee directory to your company’s intranet by creating a site restricted by IP range.
  • Create a recruiting website—Post job openings to a public site and permit visitors to submit applications and resumes online.
  • Publish a catalog of products—List all of your company’s products on a public website, with model numbers, current prices, and merchandise images pulled dynamically from your organization.

Because Salesforce Sites are served directly from the Salesforce organization, a site’s availability is directly connected to the organization’s availability. During your organization’s maintenance window for major releases, your sites are unavailable; users who attempt to access a site see a Lightning Platform-branded maintenance page or your custom Service Not Available Page. It’s a good idea to tell your site users of the discharge maintenance windows and related site’s unavailability beforehand. You can view specific maintenance windows, listed by instance, at trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/#maint.

The Salesforce Sites Domain

For each of your sites, you identify the URL of the location by establishing the site’s name. You can choose one among the subsequent domain options:

Use your Salesforce Sites name, which is your unique subdomain prefix plus secure.force.com. For example, if you choose SitesSubdomainName as your subdomain prefix, your domain name would be http://SitesSubdomainName.secure.force.com. The name is case-sensitive.
Create a branded, custom web address, like http://www.myOrgName.com, by registering through a website name registrar. Create CNAME records to redirect your branded domain and subdomains to your Salesforce Sites domain without exposing the secure.force.com name within the URL. It can take up to 48 hours for your Salesforce Sites domain to become available on the web. Custom web addresses aren’t supported for the sandbox or Developer Edition organizations.

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