Putting your own domain on a project

Every project you build gets an address straight away, something like booking.your-name.restful.host, with HTTPS already working. That's enough to send to a friend or a client. At some point, though, you want the real thing: clay-studio.com, no subdomain, no mention of us.

Here's the whole process.

1. Buy the domain

Anywhere you like: Namecheap, Cloudflare, Porkbun, whoever. You don't need to buy hosting, an SSL certificate, or a "web plan". Just the domain.

2. Add it in your dashboard

Open Domains in your dashboard, add the domain, and pick which project it should point at. You'll get back the DNS record to create: an A record for a bare domain like clay-studio.com, or a CNAME for something like www.clay-studio.com.

You can point several domains at the same project (an apex and a www, say), or send different domains to different projects on the same machine.

3. Paste that record at your registrar

Log in wherever you bought the domain, find the DNS settings, and add the record. This is the only genuinely fiddly step, and it's about two minutes of copying and pasting.

4. Wait a few minutes

We check for the record, and once it shows up we issue the certificate and switch the domain over. The padlock appears on its own; renewals happen on their own too. You don't have to think about certificates again.

If it doesn't work

DNS changes can take a while to spread, usually minutes, occasionally an hour or more depending on your registrar. If the domain is still showing as pending well after that, the usual causes are:

• The record was added to the wrong domain (easy to do if you own a few).
• There's an old A or CNAME record for the same name still in place, and the two are fighting. Delete the old one.
• The registrar added its own parking or redirect service on top. Turn that off.

Still stuck? Email us with the domain name and we'll look at what your DNS is actually returning.