With the new release of Spring ’23, Salesforce is enforcing “Enhanced Domains”. This was necessary because of the way most browsers are handling cookies. You can recognize these enhanced domains by the address in your address bar, which reads something like: www.mycompanyname.my.salesforce.com.
Read on to discover:
The new Enhanced Domains will meet the latest browser requirements and ensures that your Salesforce URLs contain your company-specific “My Domain” name. This is also true for URLs for Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files. The new “Enhanced Domains” will ensure that your Salesforce data is protected from unauthorized access. The full list of all the URL formats after the change, can be found here: URL formats here.
As of the Salesforce Spring ’23 Release (in February), enhanced domains will be deployed by default in new orgs and will be required in all orgs in Winter ’24. You can opt-out from the automatic deployment of enhanced domains through an org-level setting.
If you missed the information on Enhanced Domains in our Spring ’23 release webinar you can rewatch our BRIGHTFOX webinar here.
To understand the need for this change, let’s have a look at cookies first. Not the edible cookies, but first-party and third-party cookies. Both types are bits of information that collect web-user data. Both are used to store data such as surfing and personalization preferences and user tracking information.
The difference is in who uses that data and whom the cookie collects data for.
A first-party cookie is placed on a website by the publisher or owner of the site and collects user data for the publisher or owner. They are often used to improve user experience (UX) by remembering user preferences and settings. Items added to online retail shopping carts, usernames, passwords, and language preferences are information that first-party cookies might store.
A third-party cookie is placed on a website by someone other than the owner: a third party. These could be set by an advertising network that a site may subscribe to in the hopes of collecting data and drive up sales or page hits.
As a result of regulatory and consumer pressure, major web browsers like safari, Firefox and Google Chrome are blocking third-party cookies. Today, users can choose to disable the setting to allow cookies, but browser developers indicate that they intend to permanently block third-party cookies in the future.
Without enhanced domains, Salesforce content can be delivered from multiple domains. When the user’s browser blocks third-party cookies, some content in Salesforce might be blocked. For example, a landing page ending in lightning.force.com can’t load content stored in your org and accessed via a URL
ending in documentforce.com. The resulting error often mentions “cross-domain cookies” or “cross-site cookies.”
With enhanced domains, all Salesforce content have a common domain, so the cookies can be shared, and the browsers allow access, even when third-party cookies are blocked.
Enabling Enhanced Domains is an easy-to-set-up feature, and there are no additional fees associated with using it. But it provides multiple other benefits too, such as:
When you deploy enhanced domains, login URLs for your sites change. Your My Domain URL changes when you deploy enhanced domains in a sandbox.
Enhanced domains don’t change your My Domain login URL in production unless you also change your My Domain name or suffix.
When your My Domain login URL or site URL changes, authentication methods such as SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA) can stop working. Before you deploy a change to your My Domain, make sure to preserve access for your users and admins.
Congratulations! You have successfully set up Salesforce’s enhanced domain feature. That’s how easy it is. You should now be able to access Salesforce using your company’s custom domain name.
If enhanced domains are not deployed in your Salesforce org before Salesforce deploys the feature for you, some issues can arise. Here is a checklist with possible issues for your org.
You can always rely on BRIGHTFOX to help you with the setup of your ‘My Domain’. We can handle this checklist for you and provide you with all the answers you need.
*A Salesforce instance is the data center that is hosting your Salesforce org, there are lots of salesforce orgs that share the same data center/instance in a multitenant cloud.
