Insight 1 of 10
How does a domain name lead visitors to your site?
Your site's address on , the that publishes it, ends in vercel.app, which works but is hard to remember. A is the address people type to reach a site, such as example.com. You rent it by the year from a , a company that sells domain names, such as GoDaddy or Squarespace. The registrar bills you every year, and a renewal may cost more than the first year. Either registrar sells new domains, and a domain held elsewhere follows the same steps at that registrar.
The registrar also keeps your domain's (Domain Name System) settings. DNS is the internet's directory: it tells browsers which computer answers for each name. Each entry in it is a . Connecting your domain means entering the records Vercel gives you at your registrar, so the name points to Vercel.
If your domain already shows a website, such as one built with Squarespace or GoDaddy, that site stops showing once the domain points to Vercel. Email records, named MX, stay untouched, and email at your domain arrives as before.
Practice
Not answeredYou bought a at GoDaddy, and your site runs on . What connects the two?