Hello. I have a new Webflow site that I want to launch this week but I’m a little confused. There is an old site sitting on the client’s domain. I want to put my new site live but on a subdomain of this to test it live. My client has signed up for the Webflow CMS plan and is willing to switch hosting.
What steps do I need to take to make this happen? Do I need to contact their current hots (Network Solutions)?
Thank you! I have but many sites but I always get confused by the hosting.
You need DNS access. If you’re setting it up on a subdomain, you’ll need to follow Webflow’s subdomain configuration and set that up in the DNS.
Just a note, you’re kind of creating double work for yourself by “testing”, in the sense that a subdomain configuration and a regular domain configuration are different and might be confusing to switch from one to the other.
Yes, you are right and thats a good point…I don’t really need to “test”…Webflow allows for that. My concern was that certain things (Google maps and the Instagram feed) don’t seem to work until it is actually hosted online.
But back to the DNS… I will actually need to switch the DNS from Network Solutions over to Webflow? What happens to the old site sitting there?
Those should work fine on staging as long as you’ve whitelisted your webflow.io staging domain. Instagram feed- depends on the provider you’re using to integrate it.
You don’t need to change the nameservers, you’ll just create the DNS entries that Webflow specifies. Two A records, a CNAME and a TXT for verification.
Your old site will still be there, but no longer accessible by that domain name. Make sure to shut down the old hosting plan, migrate email, etc depending on what’s changing.