Merging and migrating primary site domain

[Anonymous]

We are modernizing and consolidating several websites across different domains. Our primary site will change as well (oldsite.org to newsite.com). What is the best approach for transitioning our existing Marketo forms and pages to the new site? I'm sure we will need to change our CNAME setup, but how do we go about doing that most efficiently and safely on a live instance?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I assume you've read Manage Multiple Domains and Microsites, right?

You don't necessarily have to worry about changing your "canonical" domain immediately because you can set up your new domain as a Domain Alias for testing purposes.  Get that CNAME pointed to Marketo and run some tests. 

The difficulty of a full changeover is going to depend on how many places you hard-coded the old domain: for example, if there are links on your LPs that point explicitly to //pages.oldexample.com/unsubscribe.html, that's going to be more annoying than if they pointed simply to /unsubscribe.html (or, if offsite, if they pointed to a variable like {$landingpagedomain}/unsubscribe.html instead of spelling out the domain). 

There's no way to completely avoid people landing on the old domain by clicking links in old emails, so you would also set up a Redirect Rule for the old domain when you go live with the new one. But you want to minimize such redirects because they look clumsy and add network overhead.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford. The domain alias worked; anything I type in with .org now also loads when I change it to .com, which alleviates the concern about what happens when the new site goes up and all .org pages 301 to the new .com pages. The question remains then how do we transition creation of new pages so they use .com instead of .org by default. Is it as simple as updating the Domain Name section of Landing Pages within Admin? Will changing that break anything?

[Courtney_McAra4]

+Subscribing...

Gordon McCallum​ - Same question here and curious if you finally pulled the trigger.  We are transitioning to a new domain.  We've set up up the redirect rule and it works.  But when creating new landing pages the default is to use the OLD cname in the URL, and of course we'd like to use the new one, and not ahve to remember or manually change it.  I'm just tentative to make that change in Admin......  Did you do it? 

[Anonymous]

So we've completed the transition from the old domain to new (.org to .com), and for the most part it's been pretty seamless. The one part that hasn't been successful is transitioning my landing page URLs. I have created the domain alias so all landing page URLs load under either .com or .org, but when I go in to change the Domain Name under Landing Pages in Admin, it breaks all existing landing pages, so I had to change it back.

What could be causing the continued issue?

[Sean_Tierney2]

Gordon McCallum​ we're approaching a similar situation and curious if you ever figured out what the issue was?

[Kimi_Heskett1]

Sean Tierney​ Gordon McCallum​ working on switching our domain from go.duosecurity.com to go.duo.com -- did either of you figure out the changing of the domain name under landing pages in admin? It also broke all existing pages for me when I tried.

[Anonymous]

Sorry I didn't notice this question for quite a while.

We did get it to work. I ended up creating domain aliases both ways a few times (deleting them in between each), and the last time I tried it, it worked. Be sure your IT department has done their CNAME setup (see Add Additional Landing Page CNAMEs - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ) to allow Marketo to use both your old and new domains. That means keeping the DNS entry on the old domain (indefinitely). Just be sure that after you change the domain in your Marketo admin settings, that you create the domain redirect and alias immediately, because all old links will be broken until you do.

Once that's working, update as many of your controllable links as possible (email footers, landing pages, etc.), because cookies don't transfer or pass between domains. You'll want to push traffic directly to your new URLs or you'll have a big black hole in reporting traffic source.

[Anonymous]

We're planning to pull the trigger this weekend (final tweaks and beta testing this week). Fingers crossed that we don't break anything critical! I will let you know how it goes.

[Courtney_McAra4]

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Moved your post to Products and Support​