Connecting Register.com domain to Ecwid Instant Site

In order to create a more professional looking Ecwid Instant Site, you can connect your Ecwid site to a custom domain name. This custom domain is the address that customers enter into the browser address bar in order to open your online store. To connect your domain name to your Ecwid Instant Site, you must first buy a domain name from a company that sells domains such as Register.com. You may already have a domain name (through Register.com or another site), in which case you can simply connect it with your Ecwid Instant Site.

Your custom domain has to be set up through both your Ecwid admin and your domain registrar account. While this might sound complicated, we can easily guide you through the entire process — so don’t worry. After everything is set up and connected, your store will open at your domain name through a secure HTTPS connection (i.e. the link begins with https:// and shows a secured padlock in the browser address bar).

Setting up the domain in the Ecwid admin

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Website.
2. Find the “Instant Site address” section and click Change URL.
3. In the appeared pop-up, put your custom domain name in the Use your own domain name field:

4. Click Save.
5. In the pop-up, at step 2, copy the IP address that you see (that may be 23.23.44.201, 34.193.83.23, or 3.211.60.235). You will need this IP later to set up the domain in the Register.com account:

Setting up the domain in the Register.com account

To connect your custom domain name to your Ecwid Instant site:

1. Log into your Register.com account.
2. From the Account Dashboard section, hover on the Domains and click Manage:

3. Find your domain and click Manage:

4. Under Advanced technical settings, find A and click Edit IP Address Records:

5. In a new A-record, put @ in the first field and paste the IP-address that you previously copied from your Ecwid admin (23.23.44.201, 34.193.83.23, or 3.211.60.235) to the points to field:

6. Tick the Delete checkboxes next to all other A-records that you may see on this page. To make the domain work with your Instant site, there must be only one A-record — the one pointing to Ecwid IP address:

7. Click Continue.
8. Click Continue again to confirm that you want to delete the selected A-records. The changes in A records will be saved and now you can add a CNAME.
9. Go to your Register.com account by clicking Manage account in the upper right corner.
10. Under My accounts, click on your domain name to edit it:

11. Under Advanced technical settings, find CNAME and click Edit Domain Aliases Records:

12. In this new record, put www in the first field and in the points to field, enter your root domain such as mygreatstore.xyz:

13. Click Continue to save the changes.

That’s it! Your own domain name is set up. It may take up to 12-24 hours for changes to propagate, but usually it happens within a couple of hours. After that, your Instant Site will open at your Register.com domain name (for example, mygreatstore.xyz) and a subdomain with www (for example, www.mygreatstore.xyz). The SSL certificate will be added automatically and there will be a green secure padlock in the browser address bar showing that your store is secure.