Custom domain name (domain mapping) for subsite

The general requirement is that example.com should take you to the primary site at anasite.com, so that WordPress can take over and load the appropriate subsite.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this depending on your infrastructure, but my favourite is to do this at the DNS layer by simply CNAME-ing example.com to anasite.com.

Note that I mentioned creating a DNS CNAME record. (In cPanel/WHM, this would be a “Parked Domain”, not “Addon Domain”.)

If you use A record or some “alias domain” function in your hosting control panel, this will likely create a new site (with its own document root) for the new domain example.com — and going to example.com will therefore NOT load anasite.com. So you’ll then need to take additional steps to forward example.com to the network site at anasite.com.

Also, will subsites operating in this way be listed correctly on Google, completely independent of the main site and other subsites, in terms of SEO?

Done correctly, the network domain will NOT appear in the subsite domain at all.

Hello, thank you for your response @gappiah

Please help me understand better. In the alias domain method, we first update the domain name of the subsite (example.com) from the network administrator, create a pseudonym domain in cpanel, and add an A record in the example.com DNS zone. This way the subsite is now published under the example.com domain.

So when we do this with the CNAME method, do we not add example.com in cpanel in any way? So do we update the subdomain’s domain name from the network administrator and define a CNAME for example.com in the main site’s DNS zone? Did I understand this correctly?