How to Connect a Custom Domain to Your Blog (Apex Too)

Your blog on a velocms-dot-org subdomain is fine to start — but sooner or later you want it on your own name, the bare one, no www out front. That's the apex domain, and it's usually the fiddly part. Let me connect a real domain, root and all, step by step.

It all lives in one screen. Under Admin, then Setup, then Custom Domain — this is a paid-plan feature — I type in the domain I bought, bright-and-early-dot-com. VeloCMS takes it from there and lays out exactly what to do next, in plain steps.

Here's the choice most tutorials skip: subdomain or apex. A subdomain like www is the easy one. The apex — the bare bright-and-early-dot-com — is trickier, and VeloCMS has a tab for exactly that. It hands you different DNS records depending on which you pick. No guessing.

Each record is right there, copy-ready — the type, the name, the value. I copy them, hop over to wherever I bought the domain, and paste them into the DNS settings. That's the whole 'technical' part: copy from here, paste over there. Works with any registrar.

Back in VeloCMS, I hit Verify. It checks the records are live — DNS can take a little while to spread — and once they are, it issues the HTTPS certificate for you, automatically. No separate SSL step, no command line. Green padlock, handled.

And that's it — the blog now answers at bright-and-early-dot-com, the root domain, over HTTPS, with the old subdomain still redirecting so no link breaks. Your name, your address, no developer, no hosting panel. Just the domain you already owned, finally pointing home.

Your blog, on your own domain, root and all. Custom domains come with the paid plans — start at velocms dot org.