Running your Blogger Blog on a Custom Domain

Almost every blogger starts their first blog in Blogger.com or WordPress.com, as they are completely free. Also, they get a free sub-domain and they don’t need to invest anything to set up a blog. Running the blogger blog on a Custom domain has a lot of benefits over the free blogger sub-domain. The top-level domain name increases the SEO of your site. For illustration, I’m moving the free blogger sub-domain getcooltricks247.blogspot.com to a custom sub-domain blog.getcooltricks.com. New to blogger? Read our tutorials on Adding Custom CSS in Blogger, Adding Widgets to blogger, Adding Custom Robots.txt to make yourself familiar with the features available in blogger. Follow the steps to change the free blogger sub-domain to a custom domain.

Note

Since you are linking a domain name with your blogger blog, you should have the access to edit your domain’s DNS records. Note that, editing the DNS zone file differs according to the Domain Registrars and the hosting Providers. DNS propagation may take up to 48 hours for the changes to take effect. Kindly be patient until that time. In my experience, these changes take effect within 10 to 30 minutes.  Avoid mistakes when entering the DNS records, as it may make your site offline until you correct it. Here, I am gonna link one of my sub-domain (blog.getcooltricks.com) to a blogger blog.

Running Blogger Blog on a Custom Domain

Login to your blogger blog with your Google account. Goto Basic > Publishing in the Settings as shown below. Now Click on the Setup a third party URL for your Blog.

Type in the Custom Domain name in the space provided. In my case, it is a sub-domain blog.getcooltricks.com and Click ‘Save’. Since you have not created any DNS records, It will show an error like this.

You have to create the suggested A records and CNAME records in your DNS with the values provided. Creating DNS records differs from each Domain Name Registrars. Check this Google help to Create the CNAME Records.

Creating DNS Records

Here are the steps to create DNS records on Cpanel. The following screenshot is captured on Hostgator’s DNS management from the control panel.

You can use the values from any one of the methods given below when creating the records. Wait sometime after creating the records, as DNS propagation takes somewhere from 10 minutes to 48 hours.

Method 1

Create the two CNAMEs that are shown when you click the Save button. Kindly note that this is not the same for all the blogs. This is just an example. www may change to something like ‘blog‘ if it is a sub-domain like blog.getcooltricks.com. In general, the records look similar to the records tabulated below.

Method 2

Create 4 A records and one CNAME record as given below.

After completing this step, wait for sometimes. Now your blog’s free sub-domain will redirect to your custom domain. In my case, getcooltricks247.blogspot.com should redirect to blog.getcooltricks.com

Now, the blog runs on a Custom Domain. Check the Image below. My Blogger blog is running on a sub-domain blog.getcooltricks.com.

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