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5.1 Understanding Connected Websites

A connected website in Tangible Cloud is any WordPress site that has successfully activated one of your organization's licenses. The site appears in the Websites list as a side effect of that activation — you never add it yourself.

How a site gets here​

The flow is simple but it helps to see it explicitly:

  1. You install a Tangible plugin on a WordPress site.
  2. You activate the plugin by entering your license key and clicking Activate.
  3. The plugin contacts Tangible Cloud to validate the key. This contact includes the site's URL.
  4. Tangible Cloud records the site against the license it validated, and the site appears in your Websites list.

From then on, the plugin contacts Tangible Cloud on a recurring schedule (a capability check) to check for updates and confirm the license is still valid. Each successful contact refreshes the site's last seen timestamp. See Activating a Plugin on Your Site for the full activation flow.

What the list represents​

Each entry in the Websites list corresponds to one WordPress site, identified by its hostname. A site running two Tangible plugins appears once — both plugins are recorded under the same entry. A site running the same plugin on two different subdomains appears twice, once per hostname.

The list reflects what Tangible Cloud knows based on plugin check-ins. It isn't an exhaustive crawl of your infrastructure — if a site stops checking in (the plugin is uninstalled, the site goes offline, the domain is retired), the entry stays in the list but its connection status changes to reflect that it's no longer active.

Why you don't add websites manually​

Trying to add a website before a plugin is activated wouldn't help Tangible Cloud — it has no way to verify the site is really yours, no way to deliver updates, and nothing to count against a license. The check-in model ties the Websites list to actual plugin usage, which keeps it accurate automatically.

If a site should appear but doesn't, the activation didn't complete. See Activating a Plugin on Your Site for troubleshooting steps.