You can now add extra domains to your site yourself, right from the customer portal. Each one either forwards visitors to your main address or shows the same site, and old links can go to exactly the page they belong on.
It's on every plan, at no extra cost. Nothing changes for your site unless you add a domain.
Why we built it
In September, a customer moved posts from his old blog to his Magic Pages site and asked us to connect the old domain. We set it up by hand. Most old links worked, but one interview kept landing on an error page, purely because a link to it had no slash at the end.
Fixing that one link by hand would have been easy. But every extra domain so far had been a support ticket and a manual change on our side, and you couldn't see or change any of it. So we built the whole thing into the customer portal.
Forward visitors or show the same site
Open the Domain tab and click Add domain under Other domains. Then pick what the domain does:
- Forward visitors sends everyone on to your main domain. Someone opening
old-site.com/aboutlands on/abouton your site, not on your homepage. Or you send every link to one page, like an archive page. - Show the same site shows your site under the other domain too.
Forwarding is the right choice almost every time, because search engines then see one address for your site instead of two copies of it.
People add extra domains for all kinds of reasons: the address of a blog they're retiring, the misspelling everyone types, a country version like .de, a short address for a flyer.
Old links, page by page
When the domain belonged to an old site, some of its pages probably live at a different address now. You can send each of those old links to its new page, and everything else follows the default you picked.
A few things make that less tedious:
- Moving from an old site? finds the old site's pages (via a sitemap) and suggests a redirect for each one.
- You can import a list of redirects from a CSV, YAML or JSON file, and review every rule before it goes live.
- Test a link shows where any old address goes, and which rule sent it there, before you share it.
- Capital letters and trailing slashes don't matter, so
/old-postand/Old-Post/are the same link. That's exactly what broke the interview in September.
Redirects you've already uploaded to Ghost keep working on top of all this.
Setting it up
A forwarding domain needs two DNS records at your domain provider, and the portal shows you exactly which. With supported providers, Set up DNS automatically adds them for you. If we already manage the domain's DNS, there's nothing to do: the records are in place the moment you add it.
We check the records by ourselves, issue the HTTPS certificate, and show you each step until the domain is forwarding. Adding or removing a domain never touches your site itself, so there's no downtime.
The step-by-step guides are in our help centre:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
If we set up an extra domain for you by hand in the past, it keeps working exactly as it does now. We'll get in touch about moving it over, so you can manage it yourself.
