Jay Site Go-Live: Domain Switchover

Plain-English walkthrough to point Jay's domain at the new site — without touching his email. Read top to bottom; it's built to follow live on the call.

The whole job in one sentence: we tell Jay's domain to send visitors to the new site we built, and we leave his email exactly as-is.

Step 1 — Ask firstTwo questions for Jay

  1. "Who is your domain registered with?" — e.g. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google/Squarespace Domains, Wix, Bluehost. This is where we log in to make the change. (If he isn't sure, ask where he pays the yearly renewal, or who set up his current website.)
  2. "Do you use email on that domain?" — like jay@hisdomain.com. If yes, we are extra careful to not touch the email settings.

These two answers decide the exact clicks. The flow below is the same either way.

Step 2 — The approachTwo clean ways — pick one

Option ARecommended — least risk. Leave his domain where it is and add one DNS record that points the website to our hosting. His email and everything else stay untouched. Fastest, safest, reversible.

Option BFull control. Move the domain's "nameservers" to Cloudflare so we manage everything in one place. More powerful, but before flipping it we copy over his existing email records so nothing breaks. Use this only if he wants us managing the whole domain.

Step 3 — Do itThe switchover (Option A)

  1. In Cloudflare Pages, open the site project and add Jay's domain as a Custom Domain.
  2. Cloudflare shows the exact DNS record to create — usually a CNAME (for www) and a record for the root domain. Copy it down.
  3. Log in to Jay's registrar (the answer from Step 1), open DNS settings, and add that record.
  4. SSL (the padlock / https) turns on automatically. Wait until Cloudflare shows it Active — usually a few minutes, up to about an hour.
  5. Give it a little time to spread across the internet ("propagation") — normally minutes, occasionally a few hours.
  6. Verify it's live: open https://hisdomain.com. It should load the new site with a padlock.

⚠ The one rule that matters: only add the website record Cloudflare gives us. Do NOT change or delete the MX records — those run Jay's email. Touching them is the only way this breaks something. We add the website record, we leave email alone.

Step 4 — Safety netIf anything looks off (rollback)

Remove the Custom Domain in Cloudflare and revert the one DNS record we added. His domain goes back to exactly how it was. Because we only ever added the website record (and never touched email), there is nothing destructive to undo.

On the callHow to say it (confident, 2 sentences)

"Your site is built and ready. To go live we just point your domain at it — that's one small DNS change on your end or ours, your email stays exactly as it is, and you'll typically see the new site live the same day."

Set expectationsTiming for Jay