If your church already has a domain name that your congregation is familiar with, continuing to use it for your Faithlife Site only requires a few steps. These steps include changing several configuration settings within your domain registrar’s control panel. Depending on your registrar, these steps may vary.

 

Note: Managing your own domain name with a Faithlife Site requires a Premium subscription and may require additional registration and administration fees with your domain registrar.

 

In this tutorial you will learn how to use your domain name with your Faithlife Site. This is an advanced feature, and requires that you are comfortable with making changes to your domain's DNS records. You will need to know your website registrar login information. This tutorial uses GoDaddy and Google Domains as examples—other domain registrars will be similar.

 

If your church uses Faithlife Sites as your primary website, it will likely be accessed using www.samplechurch.com or samplechurch.com. In web terms, www is called a subdomain and samplechurch.com is the root (or naked) domain. Other examples of subdomains include live.samplechurch.com (live) and members.samplechurch.com (members).

 

Step one: add your domain on Faithlife Sites

In order to communicate with Faithlife's servers, you'll need to add your domain name in the Settings tab on your Faithlife Site. 

 

1. Navigate to your Faithlife Site and sign in. 

 

2. Click Edit and then select the Settings tab.

 

 

3. Add the domain you're managing from a third party in the domain name input box. 

 

 

This step ensures Faithlife Sites serves the right site when people visit your domain. 

 

Step two: create a CNAME record

This step will configure the web address https://www.samplechurch.com to load as the web address https://samplechurch.com in the browser’s address bar.

 

Note: Before proceeding, make sure that you do not have another CNAME set up using www in the Name column. Some domain registrars have this pre-configured for you.

 

GoDaddy Instructions

1. From your GoDaddy My Product page, expand the Domains category, find the domain name that you wish to use, and click the DNS button.
2. Verify that you do not already have a CNAME record of Type CNAME with a Name of www and a Value of @. If you do, you can skip to “Step two: Create an A record” below. Also verify that you do not already have records of Type A with a Name of www.domain.com. If you do, remove those records.
3. Select Add to add a new CNAME record and fill in the four fields using the data below. Then click Save.

• Type: CNAME
• Nme: www
• Data: (add provided value from the Faithlife Sites popup)
• TTL (Time to Live): Select Custom and type 600 seconds
• Move to Step two: Create an A record.

 

Google Domains instructions

1. From your Google My Domains page, find the domain name that you wish to use and select the Configure DNS icon.
2. Scroll down to Custom Resource Records and verify that you do not already have a record of Type CNAME with a Name of www. (It should point to your root domain.) If you do, you can skip to “Step two: Create an A record” below. Also verify that you do not already have records of Type A with a Name of www.domain.com. If you do, remove those records.
3. Complete the fields as follows and then select Add to add a new CNAME record.

• Name: www
• Type: CNAME
• TTL (Time to Live): 5m
• Data: @ (this will convert to your root domain address)

 

Step three: create an A record

The final step is to tell your domain registrar to send visitors to samplechurch.com to your new samplechurch.faithlifesites.com website.  To do this, create an A record in your DNS configuration.

 

GoDaddy instructions

1. From your GoDaddy My Product page, expand the Domains category, find the domain name that you wish to use, and click the DNS button.
2. Verify that you do not already have records of Type A with a Name of @ or the root domain. If you do, remove them. Replace them with a single record using the information below.
3. Select Add to add a new A record and fill in the four fields using the data below. Then click Save.

• Type: A
• Name: @
• Data: 192.58.0.50
• TTL (Time to Live):Select Custom and type 600 seconds

 

Google Domains instructions

1. From your Google My Domains page, find the domain name that you wish to use and select the Configure DNS icon.
2. Scroll down to Custom Resource Records and verify that you do not already have records of Type A with a Name of ___. If you do, remove them. Replace those records using the information below.
3. Complete the fields as follows and then select Add to add a new A record.

• Name: @
• Type: A
• TTL (Time to Live): 5m
• Data: 192.58.0.50 

 

Congratulations!

That’s it! You are finished. Be patient. These settings may take several hours to propagate to all of the DNS servers that route traffic on the internet.