Salesforce Enhanced Domains
With enhanced domains, all URLs across your Salesforce org contain your organisation-specific My Domain name, including URLs for your Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files. With no instance names, enhanced My Domain URLs are easier for users to remember and remain stabilised when your Salesforce org is moved to another Salesforce instance. Because enhanced domains meet the latest browser requirements, they’re the future standard.
When you enable enhanced domains, most of the application URLs for your Salesforce org change. Those changes require testing and impact public links, such as Experience Cloud sites.
Benefits of Enhanced Domains
Enhanced domains provide multiple benefits.
- Branding – All URLs across your org contain your orgaisation-specific My Domain name, including URLs for your Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files.
- Stability – With no instance names, your org’s URLs remain stabilized when your org is moved to another Salesforce instance.
- Compliance – Enhanced domains comply with the latest browser requirements. Specifically, they avoid third-party cookies, otherwise known as cross-site resources.
Third-Party Cookies and Recent Regulations
Cookies are the reason that Salesforce has rolled out Enhanced Domains.
A cookie is a small block of data that a server sends to a user’s web browser. The browser can then store the cookie and send it back to the same server during later requests. This data helps web developers give you a more personal and convenient online experience. For example, when you visit a website, cookies allow your account, preferences, and shopping cart to persist from your last visit.
Third-party cookies are stored under a different domain than the domain that you’re visiting. These cookies can track you, or your device, across the websites that you visit and display relevant content between websites. For example, you plan for a trip online, and later ads for your vacation destination appear in your social media feed. Third-party cookies also support important functionality, such as a chat hosted by a third-party service provider.
Today, users demand more control over how data collected about them is used, and governments seek to protect the privacy rights of website users. Some laws and regulations that affect cookies include the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the European Union’s pending ePrivacy Regulation (ePR). These laws and regulations require that companies and website operators notify web users about the presence of cookies. These businesses must also let users know what kind of information is collected and with whom this information is shared. Also, companies and website operators must offer a way to opt out of cookies and data sharing at any time.
Updated Browser Rules for Third-Party Cookies
As a result of regulatory and consumer pressure, the major web browsers are blocking third-party cookies. Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox already block them, and Google has announced that it plans to phase out these kinds of cookies in Chrome in 2023.
Today, users can disable a setting to allow these cookies, but browser developers indicate that they intend to permanently block third-party cookies in the future.
Impact on Salesforce Users
Without enhanced domains, Salesforce content can be delivered from multiple domains. When the user’s browser blocks third-party cookies, some content in Salesforce can be blocked. For example, a landing page that ends in lightning.force.com can’t load content that’s stored in your org and accessed via a URL that ends in documentforce.com. The resulting error often mentions “cross-domain cookies” or “cross-site cookies.”
The Solution: Enhanced Domains
Enhanced domains make structural changes to the Salesforce domains that serve content. With enhanced domains, all Salesforce content shares a common domain, so the cookies can be shared and the browsers allow access, even when third-party cookies are blocked.
Because enhanced domains allow your users to continue using Salesforce when the browser blocks third-party cookies, they’re the future standard and required for all orgs.
Timeline for the change
The change is enforced in phases starting in Winter ’23:
- Winter ’23 (starting in August 2022): Change enforced for sandboxes and non-production orgs.
- Spring ’23 (starting in January 2023): Change enforced for production orgs and all remaining orgs.
Action Required
Because enhanced domains affect all application URLs, we recommend that you test and deploy enhanced domains before this change is enforced for sandboxes and non-production orgs in the Winter ’23 release and for production orgs and all remaining orgs in the Spring ’23 release. We also recommend that you test enhanced domains in a sandbox before you update production.
Additional Resources
- For details on how to set up, test, and deploy enhanced domains, see Enhanced Domains in Salesforce Help.
- For adoption paths, see the Plan for Salesforce Domain Changes: My Domain and Enhanced Domains knowledge article.
We Can Help!
Please feel free to get in touch for a quote if you would like NobleCX team to get involved with this rollout in your Salesforce org.
