Setting up a custom domain
This is an optional feature that will appear on the 'Company Profile' page if included in your ClickLMS membership.
You (or your IT provider) will need to have access to your DNS provider to enable your custom domain.
If you would like to enable this feature please contact support@clicklms.com to discuss the options available to you.
Note: Only the Company Admin has access to this feature.
Use your own custom domain on your site
By default your ClickLMS Admin Dashboard and Learner sites both include the clicklms.com domain in the URL.
e.g. yourcompany.clicklms.com for your learners or yourcompany.dashboard.clicklms.com for the Company Admin/instructors.
However if you want to use your own company domain for both your Learner and Admin/Instructor sites you can effectively mask the .clicklms.com name in the address bar for your site.
We recommend changing your domain address at a quiet time on your site and testing if your custom domain has been implemented successfully before sharing details with your customers. This is because there can be a delay of up to 24 hours with the DNS provider to the changes being made to your site and actually being accessed through the internet.
How it works
Our custom domain solution works by you (or your IT provider) informing your DNS provider of a redirect from your custom domain to the .clicklms.com domain. This all happens in the background, so your users will only see your domain address, but the content they see is actually coming from the ClickLMS servers.
When you add a custom domain to your site, all links to your ClickLMS site will update to the new custom domain.
All your old site links will still work (for example if they are embedded in your social channels, your website or with partners), and the site can still be accessed through the old .clicklms.com URL.
IMPORTANT: If you do link through to your learning site from other websites, for example social media or your sales website, you are advised to update these to the new custom domain path once your custom domain is up and running.
Note: When using custom domain all links should update almost instantaneously but your DNS provider may take a little longer to update the equivalent of the public address book.
Note: All site emails will continue to be sent by support@clicklms.com, but we do plan to implement further branding customisation in the future that we hope will provide a custom email domain feature.
You will need access to your DNS provider
To implement the custom feature you, or your IT provider, will need to have access to your DNS provider to add new DNS records - this is often the same company from which you purchased your company domain, for example GoDaddy.com, 123-reg.co.uk.
Your custom domain needs to be a 'subdomain' of your domain name e.g. example.com is a 'domain' but academy.example.com is a ‘subdomain’ - it has more than one level ('academy' and 'example') above the domain indicator (.com).
You will need to specify a custom domain URL for both your Learner site and your Company Admin/instructor dashboard.
For your learners you could for example use academy.yourcompanyname.com and for the admin/instructor log dashboard use admin.yourcompanyname.com or admin.dashboard.yourcompanyname.com
How to set up your custom domain
If the feature is enabled on your site, please navigate to the 'Settings' -> 'Company Profile' page from within the Admin Dashboard. You will notice towards the top of the page the 'Your Platform URL' section. It will show your current .clicklms.com URL and a 'Add Custom Domain' button.
Click the 'Add Custom Domain' button to open up the control panel for adding your new learner and admin/instructor domains.
Step 1 'Add Domain': Simply type out your new custom learner and admin/instructor URLs.
Note: both URLs need to be a subdomain of your own custom domain. For example academy.example.com is a subdomain but example.com is a primary domain.
Once you have typed your new learner and admin/instructor domains into the placeholder boxes, press 'Save'. This will update the section below with further instructions that should be used to update your DNS records. Please see 'Step 2'.
Step 2: Next you will need to add two new records to your DNS host - one for your Learner site, and one for the Company Admin/instructor Dashboard.
These two records should both be 'CNAME' types and effectively act as redirects from your new custom domains to the old .clicklms.com URLs.
When adding these two new CNAME records please ensure you choose the lowest TTL (time-to-live) as possible - this will help speed up the time required for the redirect to be implemented.
Step 3: After you have updated your DNS provider with the two new CNAME records, return to your ClickLMS Admin Dashboard and click 'Make Primary' at the bottom of the 'Add Custom Domain' control panel. This will complete the switch over from the ClickLMS servers and your company settings page will show your new custom domain as being 'Primary'.
Once the change has been enabled on the ClickLMS servers all your site URLs will update to your new custom domain. Any legacy URLs, for example in old emails, will still function as before but all future URLs shared with yourself, your instructors or learners will contain only the new custom URLs.
You can switch back to the .clicklms.com domain at any time by clicking 'Make Primary' and you can make edits as required to your custom domain by clicking the pencil icon to open the custom domain control panel. If you do make edits to the domains be sure to reflect these changes with your DNS provider.
We recommend changing your domain address at a quiet time on your site and testing if your custom domain has been implemented successfully before sharing details with your customers. This is because there can be a delay of up to 24 hours with the DNS provider to the changes being made on your site and actually being accessed through the internet.