Restrict an embed to your own websites

If your embed says “Not available on this website”, check this list first. It is the setting most likely to be the cause, and it is on the document’s Share & embed tab in your dashboard, under Restrict this embed to my websites.

What it does

Your embed code is a public web address. Anyone who views the source of a page carrying your flipbook can copy that iframe and paste it into their own website, and by default it will work there.

Turning this on lets you name the websites allowed to display the embed. Anywhere else, a visitor sees a short message saying it isn’t available there, with a link to read it where it is published.

What it does not do

This controls where your embed can be displayed, not who can read the document. Anyone holding the share link can still open it directly. If you need to control who can read something, set a password instead — see Password and email gate. You can use both together.

It is on the Solo plan and up.

Adding a website

Type the address and press Enter. You can paste a full URL — https://example.com/brochures — and everything after the domain is ignored.

Two things happen automatically, and they are shown to you rather than done quietly, because this is where almost every problem with this feature comes from:

• www is not assumed. example.com and www.example.com are different addresses as far as a browser is concerned. Add one and we add the other for you, so both work.
• A wildcard does not include the plain domain. *.example.com covers shop.example.com and blog.example.com, but not example.com itself — so we add that too.

Other things you can add:

What you type	What it allows
example.com	example.com and www.example.com
*.example.com	every subdomain, plus example.com
shop.example.com	that one address
localhost	your own machine, on any port, for testing

You can list up to 20 addresses.

Switching it on with nothing listed

If the restriction is on and the list is empty, the embed will not load anywhere. That is a real setting rather than a mistake — it is the strictest option — but it is rarely what someone means, so the dashboard says so plainly when the list is empty.

What someone sees on a site that isn’t allowed

They see a short message in place of the document: “Not available on this website”, and a line explaining that the publisher has chosen where it can appear.

Nothing about the document is named — not its title, not its owner, and not where to read it. If you’ve restricted where something can appear, a screen that says “not here” and then hands over a link to there would be working against you.

If it’s your own site showing that message, the fix is almost always the same one: you added example.com and your site runs on www.example.com, or the other way round. Add the missing form to the list. Changes reach every website within about a minute.

In Firefox, it blocks but doesn’t explain

Firefox is restricted exactly like every other browser, but the visitor sees an empty frame rather than our message.

That’s not an oversight. There are two ways to stop an embed loading, and no single page can use both. One is a browser-level refusal, which works everywhere but happens before our page runs, so there’s nothing of ours left to put text in. The other is our own check, which can show a proper message but relies on a browser feature Mozilla has deliberately declined to implement. So Firefox gets the refusal and everyone else gets the message.

The practical consequence is worth knowing if you’re troubleshooting your own site: in Firefox a missing domain looks like a broken embed, not like a restriction. If your embed is blank in Firefox and fine in Chrome, check your domain list for the www. mismatch above before looking anywhere else.

If you change plan

Your list is kept if you move to a plan that doesn’t include this feature — it simply stops being enforced, and your embeds go back to working everywhere. Nothing breaks, and nothing is lost if you upgrade again. You can still edit or clear the list while you’re on that plan.