How to point a domain at your website

Buying a domain and building a site are the easy parts. The step in between — making the domain actually show the site — is where people lose an afternoon, because it involves a control panel they visit once a year and a vocabulary nobody explained.

The good news is that it is five concepts and about ten minutes of typing. The waiting afterwards is the long part, and there is nothing to do during it.

What the records mean

• A record — maps a name directly to an IP address. This is what makes mysite.com resolve to the machine serving your site.
• CNAME — maps a name to another name. Usually used for www, so www.mysite.com follows wherever your host points.
• TXT — free-form text on a domain. Hosts use it for verification: they give you a token, you publish it, and its presence proves you control the domain.
• TTL — how long other servers may cache the answer. Lower means changes spread faster; the default is fine unless you are migrating a live site.
• Propagation — the wait while caches around the world expire and pick up the new answer. Up to 24 hours, usually far less.

The order that avoids surprises

1. Add the domain in your host first, so it can tell you exactly which records it wants. Guessing values from a blog post is how people end up pointing at last year's IP address.
2. Open DNS management at your registrar — the company you bought the domain from, which is often not the same as your host.
3. Delete the conflicting records first. A freshly bought domain almost always has a parked A record or a URL-redirect pointing at the registrar's own page; the new record cannot win while it is there.
4. Add the records exactly as given: type, name, value. Copy and paste rather than typing — a trailing dot or a missing hyphen is a lost hour.
5. Save, then go and do something else. Checking every two minutes does not speed up propagation.
6. Once it resolves, confirm HTTPS works. Most hosts issue the certificate automatically after verification succeeds.

Moving a domain that already serves a live site? Lower the TTL to five minutes a day before you switch. The old answer then expires quickly, and the cutover takes minutes instead of a day. The same zone holds the mail records, so check the spf record while you are in there.

The four mistakes that account for most failures

• The proxy is on. On Cloudflare, the orange cloud intercepts traffic before your host sees it and breaks verification. Set the record to “DNS only” (grey cloud) until the domain is verified.
• A doubled name. Some registrars append the domain to whatever you type, so entering “www.mysite.com” produces www.mysite.com.mysite.com. Enter just “www” — or just “@” for the root.
• The old record is still there. Two A records on the same name is not an ordering; it is a coin toss.
• Editing DNS at the wrong company. If nameservers point at a host or a CDN, the registrar's DNS panel is no longer in charge — the records must go where the nameservers point.

www or no www?

Pick one as canonical and redirect the other to it — which one matters far less than being consistent. Split traffic across both hurts analytics and, mildly, search: the same page on two addresses looks like two pages. Set up the redirect once, and link to the canonical form everywhere.

None of this is difficult, but all of it is unforgiving of a typo. Copy the values, delete what was there before, and let the wait do its work. The same domain usually carries the mail too, which is a business email hosting decision to make at the same time.