How to point your Cloudflare domain at your Service Bay Digital website

Your domain is registered at Cloudflare Registrar, and Cloudflare does not let anyone change its nameservers. That is fine — there is a second route, and it is the gentler one. You add a single record inside your own Cloudflare account and leave everything else exactly as it is. It takes about two minutes and you keep the domain.

Read this part first. This route does not touch your email. It moves one name — the www address of your website — and nothing else, so your mail keeps being delivered exactly the way it is today. But the order matters: tell us before you add the record. We have to switch your address on at our end first, and if the record goes in before we do that, your website shows an error page instead of your site.

The steps

Tell us before you touch anything

Reply to our email and say go. We switch your address on at our end first. Cloudflare’s own documentation is explicit about what happens if you do it the other way round — adding the record before the address is registered on our side makes the address fail to resolve and show a 522 error instead of your site. One message from you avoids it entirely.

Sign in to Cloudflare

Go to dash.cloudflare.com and sign in, then select your domain from the list. We cannot do this part for you, and no honest company would ask you for that password.

Open DNS › Records

In the left-hand menu select DNS, then Records. This is the same screen your existing mail records live on; you are adding to it, not replacing it.

Add the record

Select Add record. Set Type to CNAME. Set Name to www. Set Target to the address we sent you — it ends in .pages.dev and it is different for every shop, so use the one in your own email.

Set the proxy status to DNS only

Next to the record is a cloud icon, the Proxy status. Click it so it reads DNS only and shows grey rather than orange. This is the setting we have tested end to end for this route. Then select Save.

Expect about five odd minutes

For roughly five minutes your address may refuse to load entirely — not a warning you can click past, just a browser saying it cannot make a secure connection. That is the security certificate for your address being issued at our end. It is normal and it clears itself.

Tell us it is done

Reply to our email. We check your address is serving the right site over a proper secure connection, and we check your mail records are exactly where they were.

Questions people actually ask

Will this break my email?

No. You are adding one name to a screen that already holds your mail records, and nothing else on it changes. This is the gentler of the two routes for exactly that reason: nameserver changes move a whole domain at once, and this does not.

I am already on Cloudflare — why can I not just use my bare domain?

It is a fair question and the answer is about whose account the domain sits in, not about Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s own documentation says a bare domain can only serve a site like yours if the domain is on the same Cloudflare account that the site was built on. Yours is on your account and your site is on ours, so the www address works and the bare one does not. Nothing about that is your fault or fixable in your dashboard.

Why not change the nameservers?

Cloudflare Registrar does not permit it. Their own FAQ answers the question directly — every domain on Cloudflare Registrar uses Cloudflare nameservers. So the record above is the route, and it is the one we would have suggested anyway.

It has been much longer than five minutes and it still will not load securely.

Check whether your domain has a CAA record on that same DNS screen. A CAA record restricts which companies may issue a certificate for your domain, and if yours does not permit ours, the certificate never issues and the address never comes up. Tell us and we will send you the exact line to add — Cloudflare documents this as a known cause.

Do I lose my domain?

No. It stays registered to you at Cloudflare, you keep paying Cloudflare for it, and your dashboard still controls it. All you have added is one instruction telling browsers where your website lives.

Can I change it back?

Yes, and it is one step: delete the record you added. Nothing here is one-way.

Steps checked against Cloudflare Registrar’s own help page, “Custom domains”, on 2026-09-15. Cloudflare Registrar can change its screens without telling anyone; if what you see does not match this page, tell us and we will fix the page.