Introduction

Hosting Strategies

Pages Hosting Strategies

Yext offers the following hosting strategies for your websites:

1. Subdomain
   • Your Yext-managed webpages will be served at a subdomain that lives off of your main domain.
   • For resellers deploying multiple websites across sub-accounts, Yext can set up a subdomain wildcard certificate on your behalf (e.g. *.[domain].com). From there, each website in your fleet can be easily hosted at a different subdomain following that format (e.g. customer1.brand.com, customer2.brand.com, etc.).
     • Please reach out to your account team with your desired domain format to get started on this process. Once Yext has your certificate prepared, we will provide you with any necessary updates to make with your DNS provider.
2. Reverse Proxy
   1. Alternatively, you can reverse proxy traffic for any domains you own to Yext’s infrastructure. Please refer to this reference article for more information.

Search Hosting Strategies

For a Search experience, Yext offers the following hosting option for your site (check out the Integration Options training unit for more info):

1. JavaScript Snippet
   • With this integration option, users will “inject” (or iFrame) the Search experience onto a search results page using a JavaScript snippet.
2. Subdomain
   • Yext hosts the search results page and thus the header/footer is created using Yext products or by a Yext team.
3. Subdomain and JavaScript Snippet
   • This option is strictly reserved for scenarios where you don’t know how you want to integrate Search. Once you determine how to integrate, you must update your domain with the desired method to avoid being charged for unused resources.
   • This option is not recommended. With the new Pages infrastructure, all new sites have a placeholder domain, so you don’t need to create one before you know which integration option you want to use.
4. Reverse Proxy
   • Alternatively, you can reverse proxy traffic for any domains you own to Yext’s infrastructure. Please refer to the Reverse Proxy reference article for more information.

Yext “Domain” Objects

Publishing Pages on your own domain is one of the best ways to maintain brand unity and ensure a seamless experience for your customers. Doing this means that the pages you create with Yext will live under the same domain as the rest of your website. For example, if your website domain is companyname.com, your restaurants will all live at restaurants.companyname.com.

In order to publish pages to your own domain, you must create a “domain” object in Yext. In doing so, Yext will provide you with a bridge domain, which you can use in order to delegate traffic from your origin to our infrastructure.

Before we start, below is a list of definitions of terms that will be used a lot throughout this article:

• DNS Provider: A company or service that manages domain name servers. This is the service you use to manage your main website e.g., GoDaddy or Namecheap.
• CNAME (Canonical Name): A CNAME record is typically used to map or point one domain or subdomain to another domain name.
  • For example, in this instance, you are connecting your subdomain (e.g., yoursubdomain.yourdomain.com) to the Yext-powered page (e.g., yoursubdomain.yourdomain.pagescdn.com.) so your DNS provider knows where to find the Yext-powered pages.

There are two ways to add a domain to a site: via the UI and via APIs. We’ll walk through both options in the following steps.