How a domain serves your site
The path a request takes
A visitor types your address. The request reaches BusinessDash, which asks one question first: is this one of the platform's own hostnames?
If it is not — and your own domain never is — the request is treated as traffic for a published site, and the hostname is looked up against the connected domains. That single lookup decides everything the visitor sees.
Published traffic takes a deliberately short path. Your visitors are anonymous, your domain cannot carry a BusinessDash session cookie (cookies are host-scoped), so the request skips sign-in handling entirely rather than paying for an authentication check nobody needs.
What the visitor can land on
| The lookup finds | They see |
|---|---|
| A verified domain, published site, page exists | Your page |
| No record of this hostname | Domain not connected |
| A hostname that is on record but not verified | Domain not connected |
| A detached hostname | Domain detached |
| A site that is not active | Your site is not published |
| A suspended organization | Temporarily unavailable |
| A verified domain and site, but no page at that path | A page-not-found state naming the path |
| A verified domain and site with nothing published at all | Your site is not published |
An unverified hostname reads the same as an unknown one on purpose. Until the TXT check passes, the platform has no evidence the hostname is yours, and serving your pages on an unproven address is how someone else's domain ends up displaying your business.
A suspended organization stops serving its public site. An account that is late on payment but not suspended keeps serving — the kill switch is suspension, not a missed invoice.
Which page is the homepage
When the path is empty, BusinessDash picks the homepage in this order:
- The page explicitly marked as the homepage.
- A published page whose slug is
homeor/. - The most recently updated published page.
The third is a fallback so that a site with content always shows something rather than an empty state. Mark a homepage explicitly and the other two never come up.
Pages are cached
A published page renders once and is served from the cache for five minutes, and publishing re-renders it immediately. So an edit appears when you publish it, not five minutes later, and a traffic spike is served from the cache instead of rebuilding your page for every visitor.
Pageviews are counted on every request, cached or not, so your usage figures reflect real traffic rather than cache misses.
Addresses that are not your public site
| Address | What it is |
|---|---|
yoursite.businessdash.us | The free platform hostname, serving your published site |
app.yoursite.businessdash.us | Your own app and builder surface, managed by the platform |
yourdomain.com | Your connected domain, once verified and pointed at the platform |
The app. host needs no DNS from you and is not something you connect or
verify. It exists so editing and previewing a site happens somewhere other
than the public address.
What the pages tell search engines
A served page sets its canonical URL from the hostname it was requested on, plus its own path — or from the page's own canonical override, if you set one. A page marked as not-indexed sends that instruction to crawlers.
This matters when more than one verified hostname serves the same site: each one answers at its own address, and non-primary hostnames are not currently redirected to the primary. If you want a single address in search results, connect a single hostname, or set the canonical URL on your pages.