The environment refers to one or more destinations where your content (entries or assets) will be published.
An environment allows you to publish your content at a specified destination (website URL). When you create an entry, you have to choose an environment before publishing it, and there you need to specify the environment. Mostly there are two environments that are used, one is “Development” and the other is “Production”.
When you are making changes to your content and testing to make sure that it is appropriate, you publish it on the development environment, and production is the main environment where your website is running. Whatever changes you make and publish will reflect on your live website.
We provide you with two environments by default, which you can configure for your websites.
Configuring Environment
You will have to follow the below steps:
- Go to Settings.
- Click on Environments under the General header in the left side panel.
- You will be able to see the list of environments that are added to your link.
- Click on any environment to update it.
- You will see the following information:
- Name - The name of the environment, which is editable.
- Site URL - The default base URL where this environment points and content gets published. It is not editable. This is also the URL where you can preview your published content.
- The sitemap is generated automatically and by default, the URL is "site-url/sitemap.xml".
- When you update your domain here, the sitemap value will be updated with your website domain i.e. “your-website-url/sitemap.xml”.
- HTTPS robot.txt - Update the robots.txt with the URLs that shouldn’t be crawled by search engines.
- XML Sitemap - The URL of the sitemap to your website is displayed.
- Point your domain - This is where you can provide your website URL to point the site URL here. Basically, the content that is published in this environment will be displayed here.
- Once you’ve made the changes, hit the Save button to update the environment settings.
What is XML Sitemap?
A sitemap is a detailed map of your website that enables search engines to easily discover, crawl, and index the material. Search engines can prioritize the pages they will crawl by using sitemaps, which inform them of the most crucial pages on your website.
There are different types of sitemaps. Experro uses XML sitemaps, which are the most common. Experro generates the sitemap for your website automatically using the web pages and content that you have added to the content library.
To access your store's sitemap, go to “your-website-url/sitemap.xml”. This will be the link used when submitting your sitemap to search engines.