What are Enhanced Domains and how will they affect your Org?
The Salesforce Spring ’23 Release will be rolling out enhanced domains in Pre-Production sandboxes (January ‘23) and Production orgs (February ‘23). You can choose to opt-out of the update before this release, and again in the Summer ’23 release, but the feature will be enforced across all orgs from Winter ‘24.
If you haven’t yet implemented enhanced domains and would like to understand what they are, and how the update might impact you, we have consolidated some of the key points below.
What are enhanced domains?
To better understand enhanced domains and their importance for Salesforce, we must discuss My Domain.
My Domain is used as your org-specific subdomain in Salesforce. This means you can include your company domain (i.e. http://inardua.co.uk ) as a suffix on your login page. For example, your login webpage would be http://inardua.my.salesforce.com … using this functionality your users have a more immersive experience with a unique identity for your whole company.
Whilst My Domain successfully updates your Salesforce login URL, not all URLs in Salesforce follow the same my.salesforce.com format and so some sites such as Salesforce Sites and Experience Cloud Sites will remain unchanged by this update. Enhanced Domains are an upgrade to My Domain, and with Enhanced Domains, your domain name becomes the subdomain for all URLs across your org, with the benefit of greater stability and compliance.
Here are some examples of URL formats after enabling Enhanced Domains:
Why are Enhanced Domains important?
The reason enhanced domains are so important is mainly to do with third-party cookies. Third-party cookies collect data from the websites you visit and store that information to make for a more personalised online experience. However, web users are becoming more concerned about data privacy; as a result, laws and regulations have been introduced to give them greater control over when and how third-party cookies are used.
As a result of tightening rules around cookies, many web browsers have already made, or are planning to make, the move to block all third-party cookies. Without enhanced domains enabled, Salesforce content may be delivered from different domains, so if browsers block third-party cookies, some content will become inaccessible.
Enabling Enhanced Domains ensures that Salesforce meets the latest browser requirements, and that all content contains your company specific My Domain name, and will remain accessible, even when third-party cookies are blocked.
What if I don’t enable enhanced domains in my org?
As enhanced domains will impact the structure of URLs in your org, it’s important that it’s enabled and tested in a Sandbox environment, prior to being rolled out to production. If you choose to do nothing and wait until enhanced domains are enforced, Salesforce highlights you could experience some of the following issues:
Users may experience errors when attempting to access Salesforce, including, but not limited to, Experience Cloud Sites, Salesforce Sites, and Visualforce pages
Some embedded content stored in Salesforce no longer appears
Third-party applications can lose access to your data
Single sign-on integrations with sandboxes can fail
Single sign-on integrations with orgs using the *.cloudforce.com and *.database.com domain suffixes can fail.
Have Enhanced Domains already been activated for my org?
To see if enhanced domains have already been activated for your org, visit My Domain from Setup. If enhanced domains are enabled, your current My Domain name will have the text ‘with enhanced domains’ written next to it. If this text is visible and the ‘use enhanced domains’ checkbox is ticked, Enhanced Domains are already activated. If Enhanced Domains have not been activated the text next to your My Domain name will read ‘without enhanced domains’.
For more comprehensive information on this topic, visit Salesforce Help using the following link:
