Put your site on your own domain

What this gets you

At the end of this your site answers on a name you own — whitlockelectrical.co.uk instead of the long grafter.build address with a string of random characters on the end of it. One name, on the van, on the invoices, said down the phone once and remembered.

Start with the part nobody tells you. There is no domain box in Grafter. No screen for it, no setting to find, nothing waiting behind a plan. What a plan buys is the ability to send your site out to a hosting account of your own, and the name gets pointed at it there. So this job happens in three places — here, at Vercel, and at whoever you bought the name from — and only the first ten minutes of it are in Grafter.

None of it is hard. It is fiddly in exactly one place, the records at the registrar, and that part is copying rather than deciding.

Before you start

A paid plan

Publishing is not on the free one

A site that has built

Publish will not open until one has

A Vercel account

Free to join. This is the hosting

A name you already own

Around £8 to £15 a year for a .co.uk

Your registrar login

You need its DNS page, not just the receipt

About twenty minutes

Then up to a day of waiting

Note. If you have not bought the name yet, buy it before you start and take your time choosing. There is a separate guide to that below, and it is a decision you live with for years.

Make the token on Vercel

Vercel is the free service that will hold your site. To put files there, Grafter has to be allowed in, and the way that is done is a token — a long password you make on Vercel and paste into Grafter once.

It is used for that one publish and then dropped. Nothing writes it down, not on your account and not in this browser, which is why you make a fresh one rather than hunting for the old one.

1. Sign in at vercel.com, or join — it is free.
2. Check the box at the top left of the page is showing your own name rather than a company or a team.
3. Open vercel.com/account/tokens.
4. Give the token a name you will recognise in six months. Grafter does the job.
5. Leave the scope set to your own account. The option is usually called Full Account, and it matters: a token tied to one existing project cannot make the new one a publish needs.
6. Set an expiry date, then create it.
7. Copy the long line of letters and numbers straight away. It starts with vcp_ and it is shown once.

Tip. If your Vercel sits under a company or a team rather than under your own name, this step decides whether any of the rest works. Grafter only ever publishes to your personal account and there is nowhere in the form to name a team, so a token made under one comes back refused however many times you try it. Make it on your own account. If the site has to live under the company in the end, move the project across at Vercel afterwards — that is a move it can do and we cannot.

Note. The same steps are folded under the token box in Grafter, behind a line reading I've never done this — show me how. Worth opening once even if you have made tokens before, because the scope is the step people who know what they are doing skip.

Put the site online

This is the Grafter half. About a minute of typing and two of waiting.

1. In the editor, press Publish at the far right of the bar along the top. On a phone, open the three-line menu button in that bar instead — Publish is one of the rows inside it.
2. Choose Put your site online — the third item in the panel.
3. Paste your token into Vercel access token.
4. Leave Name for your site exactly as it arrives. That name becomes your address at Vercel and it is how every later publish finds the same site again.
5. Press Put it online. It reads Building your site… while it works.
6. Wait. A line appears just above the button reading Live site, with a link after it.

Tip. Leave the tab open while it builds. It watches for about three minutes and then stops, with a line saying the build is still running at Vercel and where to go and watch it finish. That is not a failure. Closing the tab ends the watching in the same way and does not end the build. Either way, look at your Vercel account before you press the button again: a second publish while the first is still going comes back refused, saying the project is busy with another deployment.

Note. You can ignore the link it hands you. That one is a snapshot of this single publish, frozen at this build for good, and it is not what your name will point at. What matters for the next step is that a project has now appeared on your Vercel account.

Add the name at Vercel

Everything from here happens on somebody else's website, so this describes what you are hunting for rather than promising what the buttons say. Menus get renamed. The shape of the job does not.

1. Sign in at vercel.com and open the project the publish just made. It is listed under whatever was in the Name for your site box.
2. Go into that project's own settings — the project's, not your account's — and find the section for domains.
3. Type the name you own, with no http and no www on the front, and add it.
4. Add the www version as well. One of the two is normally offered as a redirect to the other. Take that offer, and send people to whichever version is going on the van.
5. Vercel now shows you the record or records it wants at your registrar. Leave that page open — you are about to copy from it.

Tip. Do not type in record values from a guide, including this one. They differ by account and by which version of the name you added, and there are a great many pages on the internet still showing values from years ago. The only correct ones are on your screen.

Put the records at your registrar

The registrar is whoever you bought the name from and took the payment for it. It is a different company from Vercel and the two do not talk to each other. This step is you carrying values from one to the other.

Every registrar lays this out differently. What you are looking for is the list of DNS records for that name — sometimes under DNS, sometimes under advanced settings, sometimes behind a link about name servers.

1. In another tab, sign in to your registrar and open the DNS records for the name.
2. Add each record exactly as Vercel showed it — the type, the name and the value, character for character.
3. Turn off any web forwarding, parking page or holding page the registrar had on the name.
4. Save, and go back to the Vercel page you left open.

• MX records carry your email. Leave them alone — deleting one stops your mail rather than your website.
• For the bare name, the record's name field is usually @ or is left empty. For the other one it is www.
• If there is a TTL box, the smallest number offered is fine. It only decides how long the old answer is remembered.
• A record that already exists for the same name has to go before the new one will take. Two answers for one name is the commonest reason this appears to do nothing.

Note. Some registrars offer to hand the whole name over to Vercel instead, by changing the name servers. That works too and is fewer things to type. It moves every record on the name at once, though, including the ones carrying your email — so if you have mail on that name, adding the records one at a time is the safer of the two.

How to tell it worked

It should now be working is not a test. Here are the ones that are, in the order worth doing them.

1. Give it ten minutes, then type the name into a phone on mobile data rather than on the wifi you have been working on. A network that has already looked that name up holds the old answer for a while, and yours is the one most likely to be holding it.
2. Check that what comes back is your site. The registrar's own holding page instead means the forwarding above is still switched on.
3. Look at the padlock in the address bar. The certificate for the name is issued once your records can be seen, and until then a browser warns about the connection. That warning clears itself and is not something to go and fix.
4. Send yourself a test message from the contact form on the site at its new address, then open Leads on your site's dashboard.

Tip. The test message is the real check and it is the one people skip. Your form posts back to us from wherever the site is hosted, so a message sent from your own name lands in the same Leads panel as one from the free address. Nothing has to be reconnected.

Note. If that test message does not turn up, the form on your site was written before forms could post from outside our own address. Ask for the contact form to be rebuilt in one more turn, then publish again with the same name in the box.

How long to wait before worrying

Usually under an hour, often within ten minutes. The change has to spread from your registrar out to every network that might be asked for it, and they each update at their own pace. A day is the outside figure and it is normal rather than a sign of trouble.

There is nothing to press in the meantime, and pressing things does not help. Adding the records a second time, slightly differently, is the one reliable way to make this take longer than it needed to.

Note. The domains page on your Vercel project is the honest status: it says whether it can see your records yet. Believe that over your own browser, which is remembering an answer from before you started.

What changes afterwards, and what does not

One thing to know before you close these tabs. Next time you publish from Grafter, the Name for your site box decides whether your domain follows. Leave it exactly as it was and the publish lands on the same Vercel project — the one your name points at — and the new version appears at your address on its own, with nothing for you to do.

Change that box and you make a second, separate site at a second address. Your name goes on pointing at the first one, quietly serving the old build to everybody who types it.

• The free grafter.build address goes on working. Both are live and nothing has moved.
• Nothing in Grafter knows about your domain. No screen lists it, and nothing here will warn you when it is due to expire — turn auto-renew on at the registrar instead.
• Messages from the form still arrive in the Leads panel on your dashboard, from the new address as well as the old. They are not emailed to you, so that panel is the thing to check.
• Visitor numbers keep counting. The site reports its own page views wherever it is hosted.
• A domain is not an inbox. An address on that name is bought separately, usually a few pounds a month per mailbox.
• Renewing the name is at the registrar and has nothing to do with your plan here. Let it lapse and the site goes dark while it is still perfectly online.

Note. Nothing about any of this needed a rebuild. The site your name now points at is the one you already had.

Common questions

Can I add my domain from inside Grafter?

No. There is no domain screen, no setting and nothing hidden behind a plan. The name is added at the hosting account you publish to, which is why this page exists.

Do I have to publish before I add the name?

Yes. The name has to point at something, so the site goes up first and the name is added to it afterwards. Doing it the other way round gives you a name pointing at nothing for a day.

Does the free grafter.build address stop working?

No. Both stay live. Publishing puts a copy on hosting of your own; it does not move anything or switch anything off.

I published again and my domain still shows the old site.

The name in the box was changed, so the publish went to a second site and your domain is still pointing at the first. Republish with the original name, or move the domain across at Vercel to whichever project holds the version you want.

Can I do this on my company's team account?

Not from here. Publish with a token on your own account, add the name there, and move the project across at Vercel later if it has to live under the company.

Do I need to repeat this every time I change the site?

No. It is once. After that, every publish under the same name appears at your address on its own.