Your free address, and what changes when you connect a domain

Every website you create comes with an address of its own: the name you chose at creation, followed by .free.clickwhale.com. It works from the moment the website exists, it costs nothing, and it's what you use to look at your site, show it to a colleague, and keep it reachable while a real domain is being set up.

Visit site at the top of that page opens the same address, until you have a domain of your own.

The free address is kept out of Google. It is a working address, not a published one.

Where it comes from

The Website domain name you filled in when you created the website is the address. Bakkerij De Vries became bakkerij-de-vries, so the address is bakkerij-de-vries.free.clickwhale.com. See Creating a new website.

It can't be changed afterwards. There's no rename anywhere in the portal, and no support request will produce one either. If the name is wrong and the site is still new, create it again. If it isn't, connect your own domain; that becomes the address the site presents itself as.

What it's for, and what it isn't for

It is for: working on your site and seeing the result, sending someone a link to look at it, testing forms, and keeping the website online during the days or weeks between ordering a domain and that domain going live.

It is not for: being your website's public address. Four things are true of it that aren't true of a real domain:

This overrides your own SEO settings, and publishing won't change it. A page you've explicitly set to be indexed is still noindex when it's reached on the free address, and indexed normally when it's reached on your domain. There's nothing wrong and nothing to fix. See Page settings and SEO.

What happens when your domain goes live

Once the domain you've set as the main domain reaches the Live status, the free address stops serving your site and redirects to your domain instead, permanently, keeping the rest of the address intact. Someone who has bookmarked bakkerij-de-vries.free.clickwhale.com/contact lands on bakkerij-de-vries.nl/contact.

Three consequences:

• Nothing breaks while you're waiting. The redirect is strictly tied to the domain being Live. All the time it's still verifying, or waiting on DNS, or getting its certificate, the free address goes on serving the site normally.
• Old links keep working, permanently redirected rather than dropped.
• The preview from the builder is unaffected. Previewing your work always shows you the page you asked for, whichever address you're on.

Only the main domain does this. If you have a domain connected but haven't made it the main one, the free address goes on serving the site. See Connecting a domain.

It is not a fallback when a subscription ends

If a website goes Offline (a trial that ran out, or a subscription that lapsed and whose grace period closed) the free address stops answering too. Visitors get the ClickWhale "temporarily unavailable" page there just as they do on your own domain.

Your work is untouched and the builder still opens. See Your subscription.

Common issues