How your domain, Cloudflare and website fit together

Short answer: your domain name stays where it is, your email stays where it is, and you keep owning all of it. The one change is that your domain's "address book" moves into a free Cloudflare account in your own name, which then sends website visitors to your new site and email to your email provider, exactly as before.

The five parts, in plain English

1. Your domain name (say, yourbusiness.com.au) is the name people type. You don't buy it outright: you register it, usually for one to five years at a time, and renew it.
2. The registrar is the company you registered it with and pay the renewal to, such as VentraIP, Crazy Domains or GoDaddy. Its main job here is to record which nameservers answer for your domain.
3. The nameservers are that answer. They're a setting at your registrar, two addresses that say "ask these servers about this domain". At the moment they probably point to your registrar, web host or IT provider.
4. The DNS records live wherever the nameservers point. They're your domain's address book: one line says where the website is, others say where email goes (records called MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC) and how Microsoft 365 or Google finds your mailboxes. With a Shipshape site, they live in your own Cloudflare account.
5. Your website and your email are separate services. The address book sends visitors to the website (on Cloudflare Pages) and email to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or whoever handles it now. Changing one doesn't change the other.

Why the nameservers point to your own Cloudflare account

Cloudflare is what makes the site fast and secure: it serves the pages from near your visitors, blocks attacks, handles the secure padlock, redirects old addresses, and runs the privacy-friendly visitor statistics and Web tag management. It can only do that for a domain whose address book it holds, and Cloudflare's free plan needs the nameservers pointed at it to do that.

It's your account, not mine, for the same reason the site's code is yours: you own the keys. You invite me in as a member to build and look after the site, and you can remove me at any time. For a small business site the Cloudflare free plan is usually enough, and anything you ever pay Cloudflare goes straight to them, not through me.

What changes, and what doesn't

How the switch works

1. You create a free Cloudflare account in your business's name (or use one you have) and invite me as a member. About ten minutes.
2. I add your domain to that account. Cloudflare scans your current address book and copies what it finds.
3. I check every record by hand against your current settings. Cloudflare's own guide warns its scan can miss records, and the ones that matter most are email. Nothing goes live until the two lists match.
4. The nameservers are changed at your registrar. You can do it yourself with my instructions, or we do it together on a screen share while you stay logged in. I never need your registrar password.
5. It takes effect within minutes for most people, and up to 24 hours everywhere. Because the same records are in both places, email keeps arriving throughout.
6. I check it all: the site loads, test emails go both ways, and then I turn on DNSSEC, which stops anyone faking your address book.

We pick a quiet time for it, usually a weekday morning, not the day before a sale or a deadline.

What could go wrong, and how it's avoided

• A missed email record can send mail to spam or bounce it. That's why every record is checked by hand before the switch and tested after it.
• DNSSEC left on at the old provider can make the whole domain unreachable when the nameservers change. If it's on, it's turned off at the registrar first, then turned back on through Cloudflare once the switch is done.
• Records deleted too early. Your old address book isn't touched. It stays as a way back for a few weeks, until everything has been running cleanly.

What you'll need

• The login for your registrar. Not sure who it is? Look for your last domain renewal invoice, or look up a .au domain at the auDA WHOIS (opens in a new tab), which shows the registrar.
• Access to the email address you'll use for Cloudflare, ideally one that isn't on the domain itself, so you can still get in if something goes wrong.
• If someone else set up your email (an IT provider, say), their name, so we can confirm the email records with them if needed.

That's it. No new email service, no new software, and no logins beyond Cloudflare. If you're having a website built, I'll walk you through all of this before you commit to anything.

Sources

• Cloudflare: Change your nameservers (full setup) (opens in a new tab)
• Cloudflare: DNSSEC (opens in a new tab)
• Cloudflare: Plans (opens in a new tab)