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Setting Up a 'Naked' Domain in Unbounce

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Lam Dinh
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Setting Up Your "Naked" Domain

If you're using a subdomain that starts with "www", you want to ensure visitors can reach your page without the "www". To achieve this, you must forward your root domain to the “www” subdomain using DNS records.

To do that, you'll need to set up as follows:

  1. Ensure your CNAME is set up by following the CNAME setup instructions for your specific hosting provider.
  2. Create an A Record with your hosting provider for your naked domain (e.g., mysite.com).
  3. Set your hostname to @.
  4. Configure the A Record towards 54.84.104.245.
    • Any other A Records not pointing to Unbounce's IP can impact and conflict with our A Record and the functionality of this naked domain. We recommend removing any additional A Records. 
  5. CNAME records can take a few days to propagate, but once it’s propagated, your “naked” domain will be directed to your "www." subdomain. 

“Naked” Domain and SSL certificate

Unbounce provides SSL to your page via the CNAME you placed into your subdomain. Because our SSL certificates are handled via the CNAME records, SSL certificates are only applied to a subdomain (e.g. www.mysite.com), rather than a naked domain (e.g. mysite.com). 

This is because CNAME cannot be placed at the root domain level since the root domain must point to an IP address. 

Even though your naked domain is not SSL secured, you can still ensure that your visitors get served a secured web page by forcing the secured (https) version of your subdomain for all visitors, in conjunction with setting up the naked domain redirect.  You can do so within the Domains screen by toggling the "Force 'https' for all domains" button on the top right.

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This will ensure that all of your visitors will be forwarded to a secured page on your “www” subdomain. 

Note:

The SSL certificate in Unbounce is only applied to the 'www' subdomain, this means “https://mydomain.com” is not a valid URL due to the fact that there is not an SSL certificate installed on the root domain.

Note:

Using a .app domain? Unfortunately,  You won’t be able to set up a Naked Domain redirect for any domain on the .app TLD due to the inclusion of a certain network header. 

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