I have a Webflow site built for a client. Ready to go live now.
They have two domains, lets say example.co.nz and example.com.au
They are wanting so that a user can go to example.co.nz and navigate the site as the .co.nz domain, and also go to example.com.au and navigate the site as the .com.au version. So it’s “the exact same site with two different domains”. They aren’t wanting any changes across the sites, it’s going to be the exact same Webflow project.
Am I right in saying that rather than duplicating the site with another domain I can connect those domains up to the Webflow project and just not set a default domain?
Then .co.nz will not redirect to .com.au and vice versa? So both domains will point to the same site, and not default to any one domain in the browser?
Then ensuring I set the canonical ref tag to https://www.example.com.au, this will stop Google penalising the site for duplicate content.
I’ve seen a few other posts about it, but not 100% sure if this works the way I think it will! Any help here would be incredible.
Yes, in general. However that lack of a default domain can cause some confusion in Webflow itself, resulting in www.www or “too many redirects”, you’ll have to try it and see.
Another issue is that if any users try to access example.com.au you’ll generally have issues unless CNAME flattening is setup in your DNS. All links MUST route through the www. subdomains on your two domains to avoid errors.
In short, it will work, problably, kinda.
When I need to do this for clients, I take a different approach to Matrix-dodge all of these bullets. Reverse proxy setup, with two domains, and I’ll typically have some domain-specific distincitons such as the contact us page might be swapped out, or the footer might show different contact information.
In some cases, things like featured slides might vary locally, so I’ll hide and show slides as well, depending on the CMS tagging.
It’s a more advanced build to add these features, but much cheaper than hosting and maintaining two distinct sites. Give me a shout if you need a build.