At some point in setting up your new website or funnel using HighLevel, you are going to want to change from the default domain (app.gohighlevel.com) and over to your own domain (www.yourwebsite.com). This is typically used for your main site, while a sub-domain is often used for your membership site, a sales funnel or a special promotion (member.yourwebsite.com).  Highlevel has put together a great video on this (see below) – however if you are the type of entrepreneur to be sitting in a coffee shop working, or on your couch with your laptop while your family watches a movie doing some grade-A multitasking you might want a written set of instructions instead!

Step 1: Purchase a Domain 

If you have gotten here, you have most likely already purchased your domain from someone like GoDaddy or Google Domains. If not – get to it! Often times whole brand names revolve around what domain a business can get, not the other way around. This particular blog post is going to focus on GoDaddy purchased domains since our own canitbeautomated.com domain and many of our clients all use GoDaddy as their domain registrar.

Step 2: Create Your A Record in GoDaddy

Your first step will be to log into the GoDaddy account that you used to purchase the domain and navigate to the domain manger. The easiest way to do this is to go to “My Products” in your main menu. Click that link and scroll down PAST “Domains” to “All Products and Services” and find your domain. Next to your domain you should see the letters “DNS”. Click that (See image bel0w).

Once you select DNS – you will be taken to the DNS records editing page. If you have multiple domains in GoDaddy be sure to double check that you are on the correct domains page. Before you do anything else, check to see if you have an existing A type record. If you do – instead of creating a new A record you will want to edit that one. 

Assuming you do not have an A record yet, you will want to click “Add” and select record type A. At this point – stop (dont save yet) and open a new tab and head over to your Highlevel CRM.

Step 3: Find Your Highlevel IP Address: Next you will need to create a domain inside of Highlevel. Using the new V2 menus, head to your accounts Settings and select “Domains” and click “Add New Domain”. In the popup that appears there will be a place to add your domain. The sample text in this box is a bit deceiving. it says www.mywesbite.com however when you add your domain do NOT add the www – you should only add yourdomain.com as shown in (A) below.

Add your domain and copy the IP address given. (Most likely 34.68.234.4) as seen in (B). You will need to take this back to the still open GoDaddy tab and paste it in the A record you area creating as the “Value” or “Point To” field. For “Host” simple enter the @ symbol. You can leave the TTL at default or turn it to 1/2 hour and hit Add Record.

This step can take some time (but sometimes it is instant!). Head back to Highlevel and only now hit the Add button. You can ignore the Robots.txt field. If you get an error – the most likely reason is that GoDaddy has not propagated yet. Go have a coffee, call your mother, and then come back and try again. If your mom is anything like mine… enough time will have elapsed and Highlevel will now give you a success message.

Step 4: Select Your Site to Connect – The success message you receive after adding the domain in Highlevel will include a dropdown box. From the dropdown box select the website (Did we forget Step 0…. Create website?) you want to connect to the domain.

Step 5: Choose the Home Page – This step is important and often missed! Your domain will now be in your list of domains with a pencil icon and trashcan icon next to it. Click the pencil icon and in the “Default Page” dropdown select the page of your site you want to be your home page.

To test and make sure this has been done correctly, navigate in Highlevel back to your “Sites” section, select the site and click Settings. You should see your new domain listed in the “Domain” field.

Step 6: Create Your WWW – At this point, your domain should be live at yourwebsite.com (the first load might be a little slow as the SSL certificate is built). However being live at yourwebsite.com does NOT mean it will also work for www.yourwebsite.com. The www is technically a sub-domain and needs to be setup separately. For this we need to repeat step 2-4 with the following notes/changes:

• in GoDaddy – this time instead of an A record, you want to create a CNAME record
• Instead of the @, the “Name” will be www
• Instead of the IP address, the “Value” will be flash.funnels.msgsndr.com
• This time, when you type in your domain in the Highlevel domain field you DO want to add the www to get www.yourwebsite.com
• Select the same website in the dropdown once the domain has propagated.
• Click the pencil and select the SAME home page.

And thats it! Looking to have someone create a site for you, build some amazing automations or just need some advice? Feel free to reach out to our team!

Setting up a sub-domain (stuff.mywebsite.com) is just like setting up the www above. Simply follow the same procedure to create a CNAME record but instead of www, name it whatever you want the word before your domain to be such as “stuff” in the example above. This is great for setting up membership sites and funnels. In fact – if you are setting up a membership site for a learning program (think: replacing Kajabi, Thinkific, etc) we highly recommend it.