Custom domains and SSL

Swell supports the use of custom domains for your storefront—with the ability to auto-generate SSL certificates for your custom domains. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, certificates ensure that information such as personal data entered on your site is secure. This provides peace of mind for your customers.

From the Swell dashboard, enter custom domains from Domains within the Storefront section. You can configure and generate SSL certificates through Swell for multiple custom domains and remove any domains you wish to disassociate with your storefront.

Once you have added the custom domain you wish to use for your storefront, the next step will be verifying that domain—this will need to be done before the domain can route traffic to your storefront through the custom domain.

This step is accomplished through your domain provider. For example, if your domain is through namecheap.com, you will need to log in to manage the domain settings on Namecheap's side. From the domain provider's dashboard, you will need to find the DNS settings (sometimes the Advanced DNS settings), which allow you to add host records.

After finding where to add the record, we want to create two new records for your storefront. They will both need to be CNAME type records. They should look something like this:

In addition to setting both records' types to CNAME, you will need to create one record with a Host of @ and the other record with a Host of www.

The Value inputs will be your storefront's current name. You can find this in the Swell dashboard by clicking Verify on the domain (the result is illustrated in the screenshot above). For example, if 'CNAME: storefront-demo.apps.swellstores.com' is displayed in the Swell Verify domain window, we'd use storefront-demo.apps.swellstores.com as the Value for the CNAME record. This input will be the same on both records.

Lastly, set the TTL to automatic if it is not already populated. Then save your changes to the DNS records, and navigate back to the Swell dashboard.

From there, you can click Verify connection to verify your custom domain has been successfully linked to your storefront. Once successful, your domain's status will say Verified, and you will be able to enable the SSL certificate generation for the verified domain.

In addition to generating SSL certificates for your custom domains directly within Swell, you can also accomplish this through Cloudflare. See our Cloudflare guide for custom domain and SSL generation for more information.