Custom domains — troubleshooting

The wizard diagnoses most problems inline and tells you the fix. This page covers what the wizard can’t see from our side — mostly things happening on your machine or at your registrar — plus more detail on the common blockers.

“Live, but I still see my old site”

If the dashboard says Live but your browser still shows the previous site, the domain is fine — your local DNS cache is stale. Your laptop, your router, or your ISP’s resolver remembers the old address for up to the record’s TTL.

• Check from a neutral vantage point: dnschecker.org or another device on mobile data.
• If those show the new site, just wait — your cache will expire on its own.

Don’t roll back your DNS

“Live + I see old content” means it’s working and your cache hasn’t caught up. Reverting your DNS change at this point undoes a working setup — and then you get to propagate all over again in both directions.

“Pending” is taking a long time

• “Certificate ready — waiting on your DNS” means we’re waiting on a change only you can make. Double-check you added the exact record the wizard shows, at the right host name.
• DNS propagation is usually minutes but can take up to an hour (longer if the old record had a high TTL). For planned migrations, lower the TTL to 60–300 seconds a day or two in advance.
• Some registrars are slow to publish changes or need an explicit “save zone” step. If your registrar’s own dashboard doesn’t show the new record, we can’t see it either.

Common blockers the wizard reports

“Your DNS still has an existing record pointing elsewhere”

There’s already an A, AAAA, or CNAME record at that host name. Remove or replace it with the record the wizard shows — DNS providers won’t serve two conflicting answers, and removing previous records before adding new ones is required, not optional.

“Attached to another service on Cloudflare”

Your domain is bound to another Cloudflare product (a Worker or Pages project), which blocks DNS changes at that host until it’s detached. Open the other project’s settings and remove the custom-domain binding there — we can’t do this for you because it lives in that service’s account — then your Hoversite setup continues automatically.

CAA records blocking certificate issuance

If your zone has CAA records, they must allow our certificate issuers, or HTTPS can never be provisioned. Allow Let’s Encrypt and Google Trust Services:

example.com. CAA 0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
example.com. CAA 0 issue "pki.goog"

If you have no CAA records, you don’t need to add any.

Proxied (“orange cloud”) record at your own Cloudflare

If your DNS is on Cloudflare and the record you added is Proxied, turn it to DNS only (grey cloud). Proxying it double-proxies traffic and breaks certificate validation.

Advanced: staging the switch on a subdomain

Migrating something critical and want extra confidence? Attach a throwaway subdomain (like new.example.com) first, verify everything, then do the real switch. Your *.hoversite.build address also always serves your site and is unaffected by your domain’s DNS — it’s a permanent known-good reference.

Still stuck?

Open an issue on GitHub with your domain name and what the wizard shows — never post your registrar credentials or API tokens.