Adding a Google Site to your Google Domain
After buying a domain, setting up a website tends to be the next logical step for most people. In this post, I’m going to walk you through how to configure your domain to use the Google Sites. Google Sites is an easy way to get a free hosted website online without any coding. I’m also going to use Google Domains as my domain registrar. At this point I’m going to assume that you’ve already bought a domain from Google Domains and are ready to setup a site.
If you are looking to start a small business and need email and collaboration tools I suggest checking out G Suite. If you are looking to just set up a small personal site then a normal google account will work as well.
Start by heading over to Google Sites and create a new site. This is the time to get your creative juices flowing. You can start by customizing your site for your needs, like adding pictures, text, logos, etc. If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest checking out the “Get started with Sites” section.
Awesome! So now you have a site that’s ready to be shown to the world. Next, we need to configure it to be served under the domain name that you’ve just purchased. To do that, we’ll need to add an entry to the “Custom URLs” section. It’s located under the 3 vertical dots in the top right corner.
In most cases, websites will use a www subdomain for hosting the main website. If you have something more custom feel free to use that instead of www. In my case, I have the domain reftly.com so I’m going to use www.reftly.com as the custom URL here.
The last thing to do here is to publish your new website to the web. To do that, you’ll click the publish button in the upper right hand corner. You can also choose to view your newly published website by clicking the little down arrow next to Publish and selecting “View published website”.
Now it’s time to move over and configure a few settings in Google Domains. In your “My domains” view select the domain.
Next we’ll head to the DNS section to add a few entries there.
The first section that we’re looking for is the “Synthetic Records” section. We’ll just need to create 1 record here. The record we’ll add is for redirecting the root domain to the www subdomain. In my case, if I just went to “reftly.com” it would then redirect to the www.reftly.com where I had setup my website. For redirecting the root domain you would use the “@” symbol.
The second record you’ll need to add is in the “Custom resource records” section. Here you’ll add CNAME record for www pointing it to ghs.googlehosted.com. This is where your Google Site is being hosted.
That’s it! You’ve successfully configured your domain in Google Domains to point to your Google Site. You should now be able to type in your domain name and see the site that you’ve created. If it doesn’t show up right away, you may have to wait a few minutes for all of the updates to take effect.
