Connecting a domain to Shopify: DNS, HTTPS and the switchover

Connecting a domain to Shopify is a ten-minute job with one way to cause real damage. The DNS records that point your website somewhere are not the same records that route your email — and the fastest way to take a business offline is to replace the whole DNS zone with Shopify's records and wipe the mail configuration with it.

The two records that matter

Shopify needs your domain to point at its servers:

• The apex domain (example.com) points at Shopify's IP via an A record.
• The www subdomain points at Shopify via a CNAME.

Shopify publishes the current values in the admin when you add a domain. Use those rather than any value you find in an old article — they change.

Then pick a primary. Shopify redirects the other one to it automatically. Which you choose barely matters; consistency does, because splitting traffic across both is a duplicate-content problem you create for yourself.

The record that ruins the day

MX records route your email. They have nothing to do with your website and Shopify does not manage them. If you're moving DNS to a new provider — or "cleaning up" the zone while you're in there — copy the MX records across first, along with any TXT records for SPF, DKIM and domain verification.

The failure mode is quiet. The website works perfectly, and nobody notices for a few hours that no customer email has arrived.

Buy through Shopify or bring your own?

Buying the domain through Shopify configures everything automatically and is genuinely simpler. Managing it at an external registrar gives you more control, keeps the domain independent of the platform, and is what you want if the same domain also serves email, a separate blog, or a staging environment.

Neither is wrong. If you already have the domain somewhere and email running on it, leave it there and just point the records.

HTTPS

Shopify provisions a certificate automatically once DNS resolves correctly. It's not instant — allow up to 48 hours, though it's usually much faster. If it stays pending, the cause is almost always a leftover record conflicting with the new ones, or a CAA record at the registrar that doesn't permit Shopify's certificate authority.

Do not launch before the certificate is live. A browser security warning on launch day costs more than waiting a few hours.

Doing the switchover without downtime

1. Lower the TTL on the existing records to five minutes, at least 24 hours before the switch. This is the step that makes everything else fast.
2. Copy the current zone somewhere you can read it — MX, TXT, any subdomains in use.
3. Change the A and CNAME records at the moment you're ready.
4. Watch resolution from more than one network. Propagation is uneven; your office router is the last place that tells you the truth.
5. Verify HTTPS on both the apex and www, and that the redirect between them works.
6. Place a real order on the live domain — the last item on the launch checklist.

If this is a replatform

Then the domain switch is the smallest part of the day. The redirects are what matter, they need to be loaded and tested before you point DNS, and every old URL should resolve to a live page with a single 301. That whole process is in migrating without losing SEO.

Once the domain is live, check the policy pages render on the new hostname, re-verify the property in Search Console and resubmit the sitemap so recrawling starts immediately.

Nobody has ever regretted lowering the TTL a day early. Plenty of people have regretted editing a DNS zone at five o'clock on a Friday.