Publishing on a Custom Domain (CNAME)

Publishing your landing page on your own custom domain is one of the best methods to maintain brand unity across your advertising campaigns. You can do this using our CNAME publishing option.

What is a CNAME, and why do I need to use it?

A CNAME is a type of DNS record that you have to create in your domain registrar settings and point it to our servers (secure.pageserve.co). Once the record points to Instapage, you will be able to publish your landing pages on your own custom domain.

Great, what do you need?

You will need to own a domain name and have access to its DNS settings. If you want to purchase a domain, click here: https://d.pr/EmIWrF. If you already own one, you will need to add it to Instapage and go into your domain registrar’s DNS settings and create a new CNAME record. But first, let’s get your domain added to Instapage (so we know what domain to look for when you point it to our servers) before continuing with your registrar.

Connecting the subdomain

The complete guide for connecting a subdomain to Instapage can be found here: https://d.pr/hB0fVl

After clicking on Connect Domain, you will be presented with a pop-up where your domain name should be added. After typing in your domain name, click Continue, then enter the subdomain name, upon which you can now select the Automatic option.

Once you select Automatic, the Entri pop-up will appear. Select Continue. The system will automatically detect who your hosting provider is. Select Authorize to connect to your hosting provider. If someone else on your team has access to the registrar, you can forward the login to them.

If you can authorize the connection right away and add your domain this way, the CNAME record will be created for you, and you won't need to do anything else. For the final step, you can navigate to Publishing your landing page in this article.

If you need to forward the login to someone else, or you have access to the DNS but the authorization failed for any reason, you can manually create the CNAME record yourself by following the next set of instructions in this article.

Creating a CNAME record

 1. Log in to your domain registrar and locate the DNS or advanced DNS settings for the domain for which you want to create a subdomain.

2. Create a new CNAME record;

3. Now, use the subdomain name you have picked earlier; in our example, we used “promo”. Input it in the host field. In the “points to” field, type in our server address: secure.pageserve.co;

You do not have to edit the TTL field; just leave the default value assigned by your domain provider, unless you have a good reason to know it needs to be different.

By adding this entry, you are allowing Instapage to publish landing pages to that specific subdomain. For example, adding a CNAME record for the domain “instapage.com” with the subdomain “promo” will allow you to publish an Instapage landing page on promo.instapage.com. You can also use any other name for your subdomain, such as "campaign", "hello", etc., as "promo" is just an example. You can even use "www" if you have nothing else published on it at the moment.

Important notes:

1. 1. You must have at least one page published on a subdomain in order for the SSL certificate to be enabled for that particular subdomain. 
2. 2. Instapage requires a CNAME record pointing to secure.pageserve.co for publishing; it is not possible to connect your domain using an IP address or an A record. If you see existing A records in your DNS settings, they were not added by Instapage and likely belong to another service.
3. 3. You must ensure no other records share the same name as your CNAME to avoid conflicts, as Instapage will not function via any method other than the specified CNAME configuration.
4. 4. It can take a few hours for your CNAME record to be fully propagated; it is not an instant process.
5. 5. If you have a CAA record added to your domain, you will need to add an additional CAA record for letsencrypt.org in order for us to be able to apply an SSL certificate to your newly created subdomain. This is not necessary if you don't have an existing CAA record already.
6. 6. Changing your nameservers means your DNS records will no longer be managed by the previous host. You will need to recreate and manage all DNS records in the new hosting provider’s DNS settings.
7. 7. If you have a website on your domain (usually on the root domain - "www"), you should not use "www" for the CNAME you will create for publishing your Instapage landing page, as it will result in your site being offline.

Publishing your landing page

After your record has fully propagated, you are ready to publish a page onto your domain.

Choose a page that you would like to publish and click on Publish Page from the slider or on Publish from inside the builder, then select Custom Domain from the publishing options.

Next, select your domain from the drop-down list and optionally type in a new subdirectory URL name in the second field. Click Publish and then Confirm, and you are done.

Your published page URL should look like this: promo.domain.com/campaign

Please note that you can add as many unique URLs to this subdomain as you’d like. However, to publish to a new subdomain, you will need to add another CNAME entry in your domain registrar.