Help Centre / Domains And Going Live

Connect A Domain To Your Website

Updated 2 October 2026

Every website here is born with its own address, something like site-1a2b3c4d.oxyforge.net. It works, it has a certificate, and it is where you build and test. Connecting your real domain is the last step, and it comes down to adding one record at the company you bought the domain from.

Oxyforge does not sell domains. You buy the domain wherever you like and keep it there. All we need is for it to point here.

Before You Start

You need the sign-in for wherever your domain’s DNS is managed. That is usually the registrar you bought it from, sometimes Cloudflare, sometimes whoever built your last site. Find it before you begin, because that is the part people get stuck on.

If you are moving an existing site, finish the copy and test it on the platform address first. See what to test before you point your domain.

Step 1: Add The Domain In The Members Area

Open the website in the members area and go to the Domains tab. Choose Connect A Domain and type the domain exactly as you own it, with no https:// and no trailing slash.

The domain appears in the list straight away, marked pending. Pending means we are watching DNS and have not seen it point here yet. Nothing is live, and nothing on your current host has changed.

Step 2: Copy The Record The Page Shows You

The Domains tab displays the exact record to add, as a small table with four columns, each value with a Copy button. For www.yourdomain.com it looks like this:

If your DNS is on Cloudflare, the record must be DNS only: click the orange cloud next to it so it turns grey. A proxied record stops the certificate from being issued and the domain sits on “pending” forever. You lose nothing by turning it grey; HTTPS and the CDN still come from Oxyforge’s own Cloudflare setup.

Always connect the www version. A bare root domain, yourdomain.com with nothing in front, cannot be pointed at Oxyforge: the DNS standard does not allow a CNAME there, and the workaround records some registrars offer (ALIAS, ANAME) proved unreliable, so we no longer accept a root. Instead, at your registrar, set up URL forwarding (sometimes called domain forwarding or a web redirect) from yourdomain.com to https://www.yourdomain.com. Visitors who type the bare name land on your site a moment later, and search engines see one address.

Use the values on your own Domains tab rather than the ones above, because the page is written for the domain you entered.

See DNS records explained if those names mean nothing to you yet.

Step 3: Add The Record At Your Registrar

Sign in to whoever runs your DNS, find the DNS or zone editor, and add the record.

Delete any old A, AAAA or CNAME record for the same name first. Two records for the same name fight each other and visitors get sent to both places at random.

Step 4: Wait, Then Check Again

DNS changes spread on their own, usually within minutes, occasionally over a few hours. The platform rechecks by itself, and once the current check has finished you can push it along with Check Again in the domain’s row menu. While a check is running the row briefly reads provisioning.

When DNS is seen, a certificate is issued, and the domain stops saying pending once that certificate is live. From then on the site answers on that name over HTTPS. There is nothing to buy or install. See SSL certificates on Oxyforge.

Step 5: Make It Your Primary Address

A connected domain reaches the site, but WordPress still thinks of itself by its old address until you tell it otherwise. Open the row menu and choose Make Primary, which rewrites the stored links for you.

That step has its own page, because there is a question to answer in the middle of it. See make a domain your primary address.

Step 6: Decide What Your Other Domains Do

Most sites have two names from the start, yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. Connect both. One is primary and the other redirects to it, which is what you want.

If you own several genuinely different domains, the row menu offers Serve As Alias, which is one switch for the whole site: every connected domain that is not the primary then serves the site under its own name, and Redirect To Primary puts them all back. Redirecting is the usual choice. Aliases are covered in the primary domain article.

Troubleshooting

It still says pending after an hour. Check the record at your registrar character by character. The commonest mistakes are a typo in sites.oxyforge.net, a trailing dot where the registrar does not want one, and an old A record left in place next to the new CNAME.

The domain is behind Cloudflare and nothing happens. Set the record to DNS only, the grey cloud rather than the orange one, until the domain has gone live here. A proxied record hides the real answer from our check.

The site loads but images and links point at the old domain. That is the primary domain step, not DNS. Run Make Primary and choose the search and replace.

The browser shows a certificate warning. The certificate is issued after DNS points here, so a brand new domain can show a warning for a short while. Try again in a few minutes, in a private window.

If it is still wrong after that, open a ticket from the members area with the domain name and we will look at what DNS is actually answering.