Once the custom domain is up and running and test domain is deleted, the website becomes indexable. It becomes visible for web crawlers and accessible to visitors directed by search engines. This is why it is so important to make sure that you get all the basic settings right.

Attention: if you set up integration with any system before connecting a custom domain, change the link to the website in the respective system before you connect a custom domain.

Some blocks may contain placeholders — i.e. the content provided by default. For example, this could be “Demo Online Store" text. This content can be changed in Settings → General settings → Info about store. Also double check the contact details (phone number, address, and location on the map).

If your website is available in more than one language, make sure to provide content for all the languages. If some localized versions are not used at the moment, just disable them. You can always enable them later in the admin panel.

To enable/disable localized versions, contact our customer support.

Make sure to set up the payment methods and shipping options properly. To check these settings, go to Settings → Payment methods and Settings → Shipping methods and carriers sections.

Make sure that the URLs in the product descriptions, the blog and on other pages do not refer to the test website (for example, http://shop12345.cartum.io/). It is advisable to use relative links that only include the website path and do not contain a domain name — for example, /catalog/xiaomi-mi-a1.

Add links to your current social media pages. If you haven’t built social media presence yet, disable the respective icons on the website.

Go to Settings → General settings → Email settings section and specify the address for sending emails from the website. This could be a send-only address with simple settings. If you want to receive feedback from your customers, make sure to specify a business email in Email reply-to for orders which may be different from Email for letters.

To set up email notifications about website events (new orders, comments etc.), go to Settings → Users section and specify an email address in the user settings.

If you are moving your old site to Cartum from a live domain which has already been indexed by search engines, in addition to the things above, pay attention to the following:

Make sure that you have moved all the necessary content from the pages of your old website. Check if the product information is displayed correctly: the product catalogs have all the right sections, the products are provided with proper photos and descriptions, and the product pages have the right aliases.

Make sure to migrate information from the service pages such as About Us, Payment and Delivery and other text pages that were in use on your old website.

If you want to retain the URL structure of your old website, create a list of templates to generate links to the main pages:

To set up URL structure, please provide these templates to our customer support.

Attention: the platform capabilities may not allow fully cloning the old links. In that case you need to set up redirects so that you customers would be directed to the new pages when clicking the old links.

If you need to set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, use the redirect import function. First, prepare a table with two columns: old link and new link.

For example, your old website contained the link domain.com/category/product_name which will no longer work for your new website where the page is available via the new link domain.com/product_name. The table should look like this:

Before you switch domains, upload the redirects table by going to Marketing → SEO → URL redirects section and clicking Redirects import button.

Cartum hosting does not offer email server functionality. If you had email addresses set up on your custom domain, you need to keep third-party hosting with a minimum service package to keep the email addresses on your domain alive.

Attention: when contacting customer support to request domain connection, do let us know about the existing email functionality on your domain.