Your site is built on Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, or Webflow, and your domain is registered with us. Connecting the two is a DNS change that takes about five minutes, and this guide is mostly about the one part that goes wrong.
That part is email. Most guides skip it, and it is the difference between a smooth switch and a week of missing invoices.
Two ways to connect, and why it matters which
Every platform supports one or both of these, and they are not equivalent.
Adding DNS records points specific parts of your domain at the platform — the root at their servers, www at their hostname — and leaves everything else in your zone exactly as it was. Your email keeps working because nothing touched the MX records.
Changing nameservers hands your entire DNS zone to the platform. Everything is then managed there, including records the platform knows nothing about. This is why email dies: your MX records lived in the old zone, and the new one starts empty.
If your platform offers both, choose records. Reach for nameservers only when it is the sole option, and then re-create your MX records at the platform straight afterwards.
Step 1: Write down your current MX records
Before changing anything, open your DNS settings in the client area and note every MX record on the domain. Take a screenshot.
If you use email on this domain — Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or anything else — this is the step that saves you. It takes thirty seconds and it is the only insurance against the failure mode in the next section.
While you are there, note any TXT records too. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC live there, and mail authentication breaks quietly rather than loudly. Our DNS records guide explains what each of them does.
Step 2: Get the exact values from your platform
In your platform’s dashboard, find the domain or DNS settings screen and look for the option to connect a domain you already own. It will show you the exact records to create.
Copy the values from that screen. Not from a tutorial, not from a blog post, not from an older version of this page. Platforms change the addresses they hand out, and a stale value is the single most common reason a connection fails silently — the records look right, and the site never appears.
What you will typically be given:
- An A record for the root domain (
yourbusiness.com), pointing at an IP address. Some platforms give several, all of which should be added. - A CNAME for
www, pointing at a hostname belonging to the platform. - Sometimes a verification record, usually a TXT or a CNAME with a random-looking value, proving you control the domain.
Step 3: Enter the records in your client area
Open DNS management for the domain in your client area and add exactly what the platform gave you.
Two things that catch people:
- The root domain cannot be a CNAME. If a platform appears to ask for one at the root, it means their ALIAS-style record, and the A record they also list is what you actually enter. This is a rule of the DNS protocol, not a restriction we impose.
- Replace, do not stack. If an A record already exists for the root, edit it rather than adding a second. Two A records pointing at different servers means visitors reach one or the other at random.
Leave every record you did not come here to change exactly as it is — MX especially.
Step 4: Wait, then check
Give it 15 to 60 minutes. Then check three things in this order:
- The domain loads your site. Try both
yourbusiness.comandwww.yourbusiness.com; platforms sometimes need both, and a missingwwwCNAME is easy to spot this way. - The padlock is there. Your platform issues its own SSL certificate once DNS resolves to it, which can take another few minutes after the site first appears. A warning immediately after connecting is normal; a warning an hour later is not.
- Your email still arrives. Send yourself a message from an outside address. If it does not arrive, go to the next section — you have your screenshot.
If nothing has changed after an hour, most platforms have a “check connection” or “verify” button that will tell you which record it cannot see.
If your email stopped
You changed nameservers rather than adding records, and your MX records went with the old zone.
Open your platform’s DNS settings and re-create the MX records from the screenshot you took in step 1, exactly as they were, priorities included. Mail resumes as soon as they propagate. Nothing sent in the meantime is lost — sending servers retry for a day or more before giving up, so messages queued during the outage will arrive once the records are back.
If you did not take a screenshot, contact support with the domain name. We can often reconstruct the previous zone.
A note on keeping the domain here
Your platform will offer to sell you a domain, or to transfer yours to them. There is rarely a reason to accept.
Keeping the domain at your registrar means one place to manage renewals, WHOIS privacy, and DNS for every domain you own, and it means the day you change platforms is a DNS edit rather than a domain transfer. The platform hosts your site; the registrar holds your name. Those jobs are better kept apart.
If you would rather not do any of this
Connecting a domain is a fifteen-minute job that costs nothing but nerve, and we are happy to walk you through it — send us the domain and the platform and we will tell you exactly what to enter.
If the bigger problem is that the page itself is not built yet, we also design and build landing pages at a fixed price, and connecting them to your domain is something we handle rather than hand back.