Bonus Lesson: Using a Custom Domain

Brooks Hitzfield

September 30, 2020 15:55

Introduction

If you've followed our implementation plan so far, technically your website is fully functioning and ready to take orders.

But, as we know many users prefer to use their own custom domain with GrazeCart, we wanted to include this bonus lesson on how to make that happen, as well as what are the benefits to do so.

Custom Domain Benefits:

Increased brand recognition
Enhanced SEO
Preserves back-link traffic

📚 Lesson 2 Tutorial

Custom Domain Migration

If you have registered a domain from a 3rd party, you can connect that domain to your GrazeCart site. You will still use the 3rd party domain provider to manage your domain settings, pay for your domain, and renew your domain.

Setting up a 3rd party domain will require editing the DNS records of your domain. Depending on the service you used to register your domain, the way you go about editing your DNS records can vary.

The most important thing you need to do is set up an A record that points your domain to the GrazeCart server IP address (138.197.58.23). You will also need to set up any subdomains, such as www, to also point to our IP address.

The GrazeCart IP address is
138.197.58.23

If you are setting up an existing domain and you already have an A record set up, you will want to delete the old A record or change it to point to our IP address. You do not want to have the same host pointing to multiple IP addresses, only ours.

The video above will go over the process in greater detail.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Our support hours are 8 AM – 8 PM EST (Mon-Fri). We highly recommend initiating your domain migration during our support hours, so that we are available to answer questions if needed.

Step 1: From your GrazeCart admin go to Settings / Domain.

Step 2: Provide the domain you want to use.

Step 3: Add the DNS records listed below using the DNS manager where your domain is hosted.

Type

Type	Host	Value
A	@	138.197.58.23
CNAME	www	examplesite.com

If you own a domain from one of the listed services, just click the link to get instructions for setting up DNS records:

Step 4: Ask our support team (support@grazecart.com) to issue you a no-cost SSL Certificate. Having an SSL Certificate is critical to minimize the likelihood of your site being blocked by your visitors' web-browsers.

📋 Implementation To-Do List

To-Do List:

Purchase a custom domain (if needed)
Update DNS records to direct domain traffic to your GC website
Request SSL certificate from GrazeCart (support@grazecart.com