How to Take Your Publisher 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 that updating your DNS settings can take hours to fully take effect though often it's quite quick.

Preparing to Update DNS Settings

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. 

NOTE: 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).

Now, you need to update your domain Name Servers

Wherever your domain is registered (often GoDaddy, Name Cheap, or Enom though we strongly recommend Cloudflare for your domain) you need to change your name servers to use the two provided in your Cloudflare account.

Once you've updated your domain with the Cloudflare nameservers, click the Check Nameservers Now button on your Cloudflare Overview page to expedite the process.

When you're ready to go live

First, see the note above about Preparing to Update DNS Settings

Updating your DNS Records

To start making changes, click the DNS option in the left navigation in your Cloudflare account:

Then you will need to create a new CNAME record by clicking 'Add record'

 

Add a CNAME record for www to point to locable-production.herokuapp.com  This record must be set to 'proxied', as you see in this image:

You will need to delete the CNAME for www (if it already exists) OR edit it to match what is shown above. 

 

Then the A record for @ can be edited or replaced. It needs to be pointed to "192.0.2.0". This record also must be set to 'proxied', as you see in this image:

 

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.

 

Creating a Page Rule

Now that the CNAME records are 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, go to Rules > Page Rules in the options in the left navigation:

 

Then click Create Page Rule. You need 1 rule as follows:

• In the URL box type yourdomain.com/* - using your real domain. Then click the Setting drop-down box and select Forwarding URL, you want to use a 301 Permanent Redirect.
• In the destination box type, http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 - the www and trailing $1 are important.
• Then click Save and Deploy Page Rule.

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

Now, let's make the site secure!

SSL/TLS settings: In Overview, confirm the SSL encryption mode is set to Full.

 

 

Then click on 'Edge Certificates' and enable Always Use HTTPS and Automatic HTTPS Rewrites.

Then continue to scroll down to also enable 'Automatic Rewrites'.

Other Recommended settings:

1. Security settings: In Bots, enable Bot Fight Mode

2. Speed settings: In Optimization click the 'Enable All Available Settings' button, then select Content Optimization and enable Rocket Loader™. 

3. Caching settings: In Configuration, enable Crawler Hints, and in Tiered Cache select Smart Tiered Caching Topology.

 

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.

You have completed the process!

With that, your domain will point to our servers and your new site will go live once all of the updated DNS has propagated globally. This can take some time, so be patient. 

Once the site is live you'll need to log in again with the new URL in place, but your prior username and password are unchanged and you can continue posting content.