Your page, your domain.
By default, any landing page you create in ConvertKit will be hosted on your ck.page domain, which can be customized by clicking your account name at the top right of the navigation, followed by Settings > Domains.
If you own your own domain, however, you have the option of using that for your landing pages instead!
NOTE: For a higher-level overview of your domain options and which might be right for you, check out our overview here.
☝️ Things to note
Before we get into the technical set-up, let's cover a couple of important points to be aware of:
1. Setting up a custom domain won't break any previous links.
Setting up a custom domain will not break or invalidate its default ck.page domain. Both will still work!
NOTE: The same also applies if you change the prefix of your ck.page domain, such as changing yourname.ck.page
to anothername.ck.page
— the original prefix will still work too.
2. If you already have a website on your custom domain, you'll want to use a subdomain for your landing pages.
This is important!
For example, if you own yourdomain.com
and your existing website lives there, you'll want to set up the custom domain for your landing pages on a subdomain, such as pages.yourdomain.com
.
This is because in order to use your custom domain for ConvertKit landing pages, you have to change the DNS records for that domain. (More on this later.)
If you make these DNS changes on yourdomain.com
directly, our landing page will take over that domain. Of course, you don't want that to happen if you already have a website there!
The only time you wouldn't use a subdomain is if you want yourdomain.com
to point directly to your ConvertKit landing page, rather than to your own website.
NOTE: If you accidentally made DNS changes to your main domain instead of a subdomain, don't worry — it's reversible! Just remove the records you added, and everything should go back to normal once the DNS changes propagate.
The process of setting up a subdomain should be covered in your hosting provider's documentation. (They'll be the best resource for this, as each one will have a slightly different process.) Once you've created your subdomain, return to this tutorial for the next steps.
Let's get started!
Here's the process of connecting your ConvertKit landing pages to your custom domain or subdomain.
1. Add your (sub)domain within ConvertKit
Click your account name at the top right of the navigation, then go to Settings > Domains.
Scroll to the section called "Custom Domains" and click "Add a Domain."
This modal will pop up:
The top field is where you'll input either your domain or subdomain (e.g. yourdomain.com
or pages.yourdomain.com
). Don't include the www
.
Under that, select which landing page you want your subscribers to land on if they visit that (sub)domain directly.
NOTE: You'll still be able to customize the URL for each page, such as pages.yourdomain.com/my-landing-page
. With this step, you're just selecting where people should land if they visit pages.yourdomain.com
directly (and you can change this anytime).
When you're done, click Next. You'll see another modal:
If you try to click Validate you'll get a failure message. That's because you haven't added these three values to your domain yet—which brings us to our next step!
2. Add the DNS records provided to your hosting provider.
Once your (sub)domain has been added, you'll be provided three DNS values in the "Value" column (see screenshot above).
These values need to be added to the DNS records of your (sub)domain. This has to be configured outside of ConvertKit, and the process will vary based on which hosting provider you use. Here are links to instructions for some major providers:
NOTE: If your host isn't listed here, search for "Add DNS records to [your domain provider]" in your preferred search engine, or contact your hosting provider directly if you need help with this part.
☝️ If you aren't using a subdomain and your domain provider requires an entry in the host field, populating this field with @ will usually work (but we'd recommend double-checking with your provider if that doesn't work).
3. Click Validate
Once you've added the DNS records, switch back to ConvertKit and click that Validate button you saw earlier at the end of Step 1.
If you've left the page or closed that modal, your Domains page will look like this instead:
The message in the red box says basically the steps we just walked through. Until your DNS records update, your domain will be in this "Unverified" status. Click the refresh icon:
...to have our app check the records on your domain again. Once it says "Verified" (see below), your custom domain is ready to host your landing pages!
☝️ Note that your custom domain will not be available for use with your landing page until the records are verified.
Having trouble getting your domain to verify? Please check out our troubleshooting guide here.
Removing or editing a custom domain
To remove or edit a custom domain, simply click this button at the bottom:
SSL certificates
Once your custom domain is correctly verified, we’ll issue an SSL certificate for it! You do not need to purchase any SSL certificate from another provider. 🔒
How to set individual landing page paths
Once your domain is verified, you can set individual paths for your landing pages.
Your landing page's path is the my-landing-page
portion of yourdomain.com/my-landing-page
(or subdomain.yourdomain.com/my-landing-page
, if you opted to use a subdomain). Basically its individual link!
To set this up, open your landing page by going to Landing Pages & Forms under the Grow tab in the navigation. Then, click Settings from the toolbar of the landing page builder:
Then click "Domain Name" from the left of the settings modal:
From here, select your domain from the Custom Domain dropdown (remember, you can have multiple custom domains per account!) and enter your desired path in the Page URL field.
Finally, click Add, then save your changes.
Domain not verifying?
Check out our troubleshooting guide below! 👇