Cloudflare (optional)
Not required, and we will not push it. It puts a protective, caching layer between your visitors and your site and gives us one clean place to manage your DNS. It is also the one account on this list that can take a site offline if it is set up wrongly, which is the entire reason this page exists.
READ THIS FIRST · THE MISTAKES THAT COST THE MOST
Where this goes wrong
- Leave the proxy off — the grey cloud, not the orange one — on anything that is not web traffic. Cloudflare turns proxying on by default when you onboard a domain, and email records and third-party ownership checks must stay unproxied or they will not work.
- Do not delete a record you do not recognise. If something looks wrong, ask us before you remove it.
- If the records are wrong, visitors get an error instead of your site. That is the failure mode this setup has, and it is why we review the list with you before you continue.
- Changing nameservers is a real change to where your whole domain points. Do not do it in the middle of your busiest week.
Before you start
If one of these is missing, get it sorted first. It is faster than stalling halfway through.
- The domain, already registered and already working.
- Your registrar login, because the last step of this happens there.
- A quiet stretch where nothing important is happening on the live site — no launch, no sale, no weekend of bookings coming in.
Do it in this order
Go to dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up and create an account with the same email address you used for everything else.
Choose Domains, then Onboard a domain, and type your domain the plain way: yoursite.com. No https:// , no www.
Choose a plan. If the free plan is offered, that is the right one to start on — we will tell you if this project needs more.
Cloudflare scans your existing DNS records and shows them to you. Read that list before you continue, because the scan misses records sometimes. Check that anything you already depend on is on it: your email especially, and any address that already points somewhere.
Press Continue. Cloudflare gives you two nameservers. Go to your registrar and replace the old nameservers with those two. That step is what actually moves your domain across.
If your registrar has a DNSSEC setting, switch it off before you change the nameservers. Changing nameservers while DNSSEC is still active can make the domain unreachable.
Send us the domain name. The rest of this is ours, and we will tell you when the move has actually completed.