Why is my Magic Pages website using the "www." subdomain?

Because most DNS providers can't put a CNAME record on your root domain, and a CNAME record is how we connect your domain to your site. www.yourdomain.com accepts one. yourdomain.com usually doesn't.

If you'd rather your site loaded at yourdomain.com without the www, you can. It means moving your DNS to Cloudflare, and we have a step-by-step guide for that:

How to Set Up Your Custom Domain Without ‘www’ On Magic Pages

Setting up your Magic Pages site to load without www. subdomain requires routing your DNS through Cloudflare. This guide covers the full setup for any DNS provider, using GoDaddy as the example.

Magic PagesSviatoslav Huzel

Why your root domain can't take a CNAME record

A CNAME record points one domain at another. When you connect a custom domain, you point it at your site's address on our end:

www.yourdomain.com  →  CNAME  →  yoursite.mymagic.page

That indirection is deliberate. It lets us move your site to a different machine, or route around a problem, without you touching your DNS.

The catch is that DNS itself doesn't allow a CNAME at the root of your domain, meaning yourdomain.com with no subdomain in front. A CNAME can't sit alongside other record types, and your root domain almost always needs others: MX records for your email, TXT records for verification. That's a rule in how DNS works, not something your provider decided.

So if you add a CNAME for your bare root domain at most providers, you'll get an error, the record will be rejected, or you'll break your email.

Subdomains have no such limit. www.yourdomain.com is a subdomain, which is why the www setup works with every DNS provider.

Will your domain still work without the www?

Yes. Setting up a custom domain gives you two records to add:

• a CNAME on www, pointing at your site's address
• an A record on your root domain (@)

That A record isn't serving your site. It only redirects. Anyone who types yourdomain.com lands on www.yourdomain.com, so both addresses reach you.

What about ALIAS or ANAME records?

Some DNS providers offer ALIAS or ANAME records to work around the root domain limit. We don't support them, because there are two very different things hiding behind that one record type.

CNAME flattening looks the target up fresh on every request and returns whatever address is current. That works.

A static ALIAS looks the target up once and saves the address it got back. Every visitor from then on gets that same address, no matter what has changed on our end.

The second one will eventually take your site down. We move sites between machines for maintenance, upgrades and failover. A CNAME follows the move on its own. A pinned address keeps pointing at a machine that has stopped answering, and your site stays down until somebody spots it.

You usually can't tell which of the two your provider built, and most don't say. That's why we don't support ALIAS or ANAME records at all.

If you want your site on the root domain

Move your DNS to Cloudflare. Cloudflare's CNAME flattening is the one root domain setup we support, and its DNS service is free. Your domain stays registered where you bought it – only the DNS settings move.

The full walkthrough covers both cases, whether you're connecting a domain for the first time or moving an existing site off www:

How to Set Up Your Custom Domain Without ‘www’ On Magic Pages

Setting up your Magic Pages site to load without www. subdomain requires routing your DNS through Cloudflare. This guide covers the full setup for any DNS provider, using GoDaddy as the example.

Magic PagesSviatoslav Huzel

Does www affect your SEO?

No. Search engines treat www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as the same site. What matters is that one of them is the real address and the other redirects to it, which is exactly what your setup does either way.