AFTER BUYING A CUSTOM DOMAIN NAME, SEE HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEB ADDRESS (URL) WORK WITHOUT THE www.

(This tutorial is for domain names registered under godaddy).

 We lose a lot of traffics when our visitors type in our URL without www. And then obtain an error message instead of your contents. Some visitors are really impatient and at the sight of the error message, they change their mind about your blog and go for an alternative and when you lose a visitor, you are indirectly losing money through clicks on your adsense ads or any other ads placed on your site. It is obvious that most people think that any website must contain the www, but you can make your site open without the www. Placed before it and this is what I‘ll show you today. Don’t worry it’s very simple and does not demand any programming or coding knowledge. This tutorial will only be based on domain names registered under godaddy, I don’t know for others as at now but if you give me time I might just figure it out for you, so keep visiting this site to get updated or you can enroll yourself on our email tutorials by filling the form at the bottom of this page. In order to make your domain name work without the (www.), You have to set up an A-Record which will link your naked domain name ( i.e.  the domain name without the (www.) E.g. bloggingcrib.com) to your main site (i.e. for e.g. www.bloggingcrib.com) and another step involved is the addition of 3 more A-Records since we will be entering 4 IP’s. This might sound scary to you and much more like a procedure that will involve the use of html codes but you are wrong about it, like I said before, it does not involve any coding alright? So don’t get scared because its more simpler than customizing a blog for the very first time Lol!. Let’s roll

STEP 1: Login to your godaddy account and locate this button “MANAGE DNS”.

STEP 2: Click on the “MANAGE DNS” button, then proceed by clicking on the RECORDS.

STEP 3: Under RECORDS, click on “A”, you will see a field with the title “host, name or label” and containing a value “@” and also another field adjacent to it with the title “Destination, target or points to” with a group of numbers that looks like this “262.239.45.22” it may not be exactly what I wrote here but this is just to give you an idea of what the IP (or illustratively group of numbers) looks like. Do not touch the field containing the “@” value but change the group of numbers under the field “Destination, target or points to” to any one of the following groups of numbers (N/B: these groups of numbers are technically called IP address but for the sake of ease of understanding, I will use the term “groups of numbers”)

·         216.239.32.21

·         216.239.34.21

·         216.239.36.21

·         216.239.38.21

There is only one A-Records section created on the form so we will have to add another 3 to make it 4. Note that these 4 A-Records will point to the 4 different google IP’s listed in STEP 3 above. Another field you will encounter is the TTL FIELD. Leave the TTL field the way it is.

STEP 4: scroll down a bit and then you should see a link titled “ADD”. Click on this link and wait for it to open, then under “type”, select “A” and fill the dropped down form thus:

Under HOST, type “@” and under “POINTS TO” type in any of the above IP addresses and be careful not to repeat any twice. Set the TTL to 1 hour or any time you like and click on save. Repeat this procedures for the remaining two until you have added 3 new A records to the existing one. Before proceeding to STEP 5, wait for like an hour for your DNS SETTINGS to activate. After an hour, you can proceed to step 5 to finish up your settings.

STEP 5: login to your blogger dashboard, click on settings followed by basic. Under publishing, you will see your website address for e.g. www.bloggingcrib.com and an “edit” button close to it. Click on the edit button and on the new window that appears; tick the unchecked button before your domain name without the www. Save your settings and refresh your page. Try accessing your site without the www. And see that it works now; if it doesn’t, give it 24 hours. It worked for me, so I hope it also works for you. Drop your questions on the comment box.