Connecting your own domain in about ten minutes

When you build a site with webMake, you get a free web address straight away, something like rosies-salon.blok.site. It works perfectly well, and plenty of businesses run on it for months. But at some point you will probably want your own proper address, like rosies-salon.co.uk. It looks more established on a business card, it is easier to say out loud, and it is yours to keep. Set aside ten quiet minutes and a cup of tea, and you will be done before it goes cold.

First, what actually is a domain?

A domain is simply the address people type to find your website. Think of it like the street address of a shop: the building is your website, and the domain is the sign above the door that tells people where to go. When someone types rosies-salon.co.uk into their browser, the domain quietly points them to wherever your site is built and stored, which in your case is webMake. You do not buy a domain outright the way you buy a kettle. You rent it, usually a year at a time, and as long as you keep renewing it, nobody else can use it. A yearly reminder in your calendar is well worth setting.

Where to buy one, and what it costs

You buy a domain from a company called a registrar. There are lots of them, and they all do the same basic job, so do not agonise over the choice. A few that small businesses use happily:

• Namecheap — clear pricing, no hard-sell, good for first-timers
• GoDaddy — the big, well-known one, with lots of help articles
• Cloudflare — sells domains at cost, no markup, a touch more technical
• IONOS or 123 Reg — popular in the UK with British support hours

A standard domain costs roughly £8 to £15 a year. A .co.uk is often a little cheaper, a .com a little more. Be a bit careful at the checkout: registrars love to add extras like business email, site builders, or premium privacy. You do not need any of those to connect a domain to webMake, so untick anything you did not come for and just buy the domain itself. One thing worth having, if it is offered, is domain privacy, sometimes called WHOIS privacy, which hides your home address from public records. Many registrars now include it free, so check before you pay. When choosing the name, keep it short and easy to spell, avoid hyphens and clever spellings, and say it out loud to picture a customer typing it from memory.

What SSL means, in plain terms

SSL is the thing that puts the little padlock next to your address and makes it start with https rather than http. In plain terms, it scrambles the information that travels between your visitor and your website so that nobody can snoop on it. It matters most when customers fill in a form, send a message, or pay you, but browsers now show a warning on any site without it, which can quietly scare people away.

The best part about SSL on webMake is that you never have to think about it. We set it up for you automatically, for free, the moment your domain connects. There is no certificate to buy and nothing to renew — the padlock simply appears, usually within an hour of your domain going live.

The calm step-by-step

• Have two tabs open: your webMake dashboard, and your registrar account.
• In webMake, open your site and go to Settings, then Domains.
• Click Connect a domain and type in the domain you bought, for example rosies-salon.co.uk.
• webMake will show you two or three small settings to copy, called DNS records. You do not need to understand them, just copy them carefully.
• Switch to your registrar tab and find the section called DNS, DNS settings, or Manage DNS.
• Paste the records in exactly as webMake showed them, then save.
• Go back to webMake and click Verify. That is you done.

Why it might not work the very first second

After you save those records, the change has to spread across the internet. This is normal and is called propagation. It usually takes a few minutes, occasionally up to a couple of hours, and very rarely a bit longer. So if you click Verify and it is not ready yet, do not panic and do not redo anything. Make your tea, come back in twenty minutes, and click Verify again. A few small things catch people out: a tiny typo when copying a record, leaving an old record from a previous website in place, or accidentally buying email or hosting from the registrar that adds conflicting settings. If something looks wrong, compare every record against what webMake shows, character by character, and remove any leftover records pointing somewhere else.

Your original .blok.site address keeps working too, so anyone with it bookmarked or printed on an old flyer will still land on your site. Nothing breaks, and you lose nothing by upgrading. This is genuinely a ten-minute job, but it touches settings outside webMake, and that can feel daunting the first time. If you would rather we did the fiddly part with you, send us the name of the domain you bought and which registrar you used, and our support team will walk you through it on a call or by message. There is no extra charge, and we would honestly rather do that than have you stuck.