Using your own custom domain

Custom domain (in your profile menu, alongside Content/Links/Design) lets you serve your page from a domain you already own — a subdomain like links.yoursite.com, or a bare domain like yoursite.com — in addition to your existing yourname.strands.io address. Your strands.io URL keeps working exactly as before; connecting a custom domain doesn’t replace or redirect it, so anything already pointing at it — a saved link, a printed flyer, a search result — keeps working.

Connecting a domain

This page is only available to a profile’s owner, and connecting a domain requires an active or trialing subscription on that profile — the same requirement as publishing your page. Enter the domain you want to use, and you’ll get the DNS record to add at wherever you manage that domain’s DNS (your domain registrar or DNS provider). Add the record there, then come back to this page and choose Verify DNS — that’s what tells us to go and look for it. We don’t check on our own until you do, so a domain left alone after adding the record stays waiting.

Verification isn’t instant

DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes up to 48 hours to fully propagate, so your first Verify DNS check may not find the record yet. When that happens the page tells you what it looked for and what it actually found, and you can check again in a couple of minutes — checking again straight away won’t help, since a failed lookup stays cached for a few minutes either way.

Once a check succeeds, the rest is automatic: we issue the certificate for your domain, which usually takes under a minute, and the page updates itself once your domain is live. There’s nothing further to do after that.

What if my DNS provider doesn’t support a bare domain?

A bare domain like yoursite.com needs a kind of record not every DNS provider offers. The DNS standard doesn’t allow an ordinary CNAME at a bare domain, so providers that support pointing one at a service like ours do it through a record of their own — called ALIAS, ANAME, or a flattened CNAME, depending on the provider. Some don’t offer one at all, in which case there is no record you can add that would work. A subdomain never has this problem: it uses an ordinary CNAME, which every provider supports.

If yours doesn’t offer it, you have a few options:

• Use a subdomain instead — something like links.yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com. This works everywhere, and you can set it up right away without changing anything else.
• Move your DNS hosting to a provider that does support bare domains, such as Cloudflare, Amazon Route 53, or DNSimple. Your domain stays registered where it is — you’d only be changing which nameservers answer for it. On Cloudflare, set the record to "DNS only" rather than proxied, or the certificate for your domain can’t be issued.
• Email us at hello@strands.io and we’ll help you work out the right setup for your provider.

One domain per profile

Today, each profile can have one connected custom domain at a time. You can remove a connected domain and connect a different one whenever you like.