Configure Your Custom Domain for Landing Pages

Video by the ConvertKit Team

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Custom Domain Support Article

Hey everyone. It's Olivia and this convert kit tip video is all about configuring a custom domain. As you may know, we host all of your ConvertKit landing pages for you and each will automatically have its own URL generated for it that you can share. But if you own your own custom domain, you also have the option to use that instead.
And this is configured from your account settings under custom domain. Before we get started with the tutorial, I just want to note two quick but important things. The first is that setting up a custom domain will not break any of your lending pages, previous C k.page URLs. Those will also continue to work.
The second is that if you already have a website on your domain, you'll want to use a sub domain for your convert kit pages, for example, convertkit.com. Yeah. Where our website lives. So if we were doing this, we would want to set this up using a sub domain, such as pages.convertkit.com instead. The reason for this is because in order to use your custom domain with ConvertKit, you'll have to change the DNS records for that domain.
And if you do this directly on your top level domain, then that means one of our landing pages will actually take over that domain entirely, which you probably don't want to happen. If you already have a website there, if you're using a sub domain, just note, you'll have to configure that with your hosting provider before proceeding with this tutorial.
Okay. Now let's move on to actually setting this up. I'm going to click add a domain here. And then type in the domain or sub domain that you want to use, making sure not to include the www then under that you'll select which landing page you want to use as your homepage. This is the landing page that will show up.
If someone visits this URL directly with nothing added to it after the slash, when that's ready, go ahead and click save. And then some DNS records will automatically be generated for you. And these are what you're going to need to add to your hosting provider. But first, just a couple more things I wanted to point out.
As you can see here under host, it says pages. And that's because I used pages as my sub domain. If you don't use a sub domain, then this host column would just be blank. You'll also notice that it currently says this domain is unverified and that's because we haven't done the next step yet, which is to actually add these records to our hosting provider.
Now this process is going to vary depending on which host you use, but adding DNS records is a fairly common process. So your hosting providers should have its own documentation on how to do this within their system. Specifically for this video, I'm going to provide general guidelines to follow and what to look for.
But ultimately this is something that is configured outside of convert kit. So you'll want to refer to your hosting platforms, guidance for more specifics. First within your hosting provider, you'll want to navigate to the page on which you can add additional DNS records, then add a new record and set its type to be an a record.
Next you'll need to add the host value, which will likely be your sub domain. Or if you're doing this on your top level domain, you'll typically either leave this field blank or at an at symbol, depending on what your host requires. Next just paste in the value itself as provided in convert kit, you might also see an additional setting called TTL, which stands for time to live, and you should be able to just leave that at its default or automatic setting.
Then simply repeat those steps. Two more times for the other two records. In the end, you should have three a records. And after that, it's just a matter of verifying them. On the custom domains page in convert kit, you can click refresh here to check the records again. And if everything was set up correctly, it should change to green and say verified before too long, there are a few moving parts that can affect this.
One of which being that DNS records sometimes just take a while to propagate, but there are some things that you can check for. In the meantime, we actually have a dedicated troubleshooting guide on this, in our knowledge base. So I definitely recommend that resource if you're having trouble. Last, but not least once your domain is verified, you'll be able to customize your landing page URLs under settings, domain name from this dropdown you'll select the custom domain you want to use.
And then underpaid URL is where you enter what you'd like to come after the slash for that particular landing pages link. For example, if you enter a freebie here, then this landing pages URL would be your custom domain.com forward slash freebie. That's it for this tutorial. I know that this is a bit more of a technical topic.
So if you're having trouble, please check out that troubleshooting guide. And of course our team and community is always happy to help.