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A site normally opens inside your storefront at /sites/<handle>, the address the API and fluid deploy give you, with the storefront’s header, cart and sign-in around it. With standalone hosting, a public company site also serves on its own, as a plain web page, which suits projects that have nothing to do with the store. Standalone hosting is turned on for each company. To turn it on, contact support.

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Which sites serve standalone

A site serves standalone when all of these are true:
  • your company owns it. A member’s own site never does;
  • it’s public;
  • it’s published.
Such a site answers at its own host, https://<label>.sites.fluid.app, with no storefront around it. The label is one Fluid gives the Site when it’s first published. A private site, a member’s site and a branch still open only inside the storefront.

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What changes without the storefront

  • fluid.auth.signIn() and fluid.auth.signOut() do nothing and log a warning, because sign-in belongs to the storefront. Build a standalone page for signed-out visitors.
  • fluid.db works, with your tables’ rules applied to the visitor.
  • fluid.cart has no cart to talk to, so cart calls reject. A page that sells should open inside the storefront.
  • fluid.history isn’t needed: the page owns the address bar.

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Search engines

A standalone Site follows the same indexing rules as any Site: it’s indexed only when it’s a live, public company Site and someone turned indexing on in its SEO settings, which are off for a new Site. See SEO and indexing. On the standalone host:
  • each page of an indexable Site names its canonical address with a Link header: the page’s /home/sites/<handle> address on your storefront, or the standalone address for a company with no storefront;
  • an indexable Site serves its own robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt when its build has them. Otherwise Fluid generates them from the routes in config/meta.json;
  • a Site that isn’t indexable is sent with X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, a robots.txt that disallows everything, and no sitemap or llms.txt.
To write the page tags, sitemap and llms.txt into a Vite build, see Add SEO at build time with fluidSite().

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Companies without a storefront

With standalone hosting on, a company with no storefront theme can still host public company sites at their sites.fluid.app addresses. Any other site needs the storefront to open in.