🔍 Overview
When your Website Studio project is published or shared, issues can arise if your primary domain and published domain do not match. Symptoms may include the social share thumbnail displaying the wrong domain, live site errors, or duplicate form submissions. This article explains what to check and how to get this resolved.
⚠️ Understanding the Root Cause
Website Studio relies on the domain configured in your project to generate social share metadata, rewrite internal URLs, and route form submissions correctly. When the domain recorded in your project does not match the domain your site is actually live on, one or more of these systems can fail:
- Thumbnail mismatch: Social platforms may cache and display an incorrect preview if the metadata points to the wrong domain.
- URL forwarding or server errors: Internal links and redirects may break or produce errors if they are resolved against a mismatched domain.
- Form submission duplication: Form submissions may be posted more than once if endpoints are resolving against both an old and a new domain during a transition.
🛠️ What to Check
If you are experiencing any of the symptoms above, the most important thing to verify is that the domain configured inside your Website Studio project exactly matches the domain your site is published and live on. A mismatch between these two — even a difference as small as a missing or extra subdomain prefix — is the most common cause of all three symptoms.
You should also check whether any domain forwarding or redirect rules set up outside of Search Atlas (for example, at your registrar or DNS provider) are pointing to the correct domain. An external forwarding rule that points to a different domain than the one recorded in your project can create redirect loops or server errors even after you correct the project settings.
📋 What to Have Ready When You Contact Support
Because confirming and correcting a domain configuration in Website Studio requires access to your specific project settings, our support team will need to look into this on your behalf. To help us resolve this as quickly as possible, please have the following information ready:
- The name of the Website Studio project affected
- The domain your site is intended to be live on (the correct domain)
- The domain currently appearing in the wrong location (e.g., in the social share thumbnail URL or in error messages)
- Any exact error messages or HTTP error codes you are seeing
- The timestamp of when you first noticed the issue
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.