When I planned a portfolio blog in Notion, I wanted my own domain rather than notion.so on every public page. Since Notion did not officially support custom domains at the time, I documented the workaround I used with a purchased domain and Cloudflare Workers.
Background
As soon as I began planning a portfolio blog in Notion, I started thinking about a custom domain. Notion does provide a shareable link for each page, but I wanted to strengthen my personal brand by showing my own domain instead of notion.so on everything I published.
Research
- I first checked whether Notion supported custom domains.
September 2019: Notion did not officially support them. I would not need to buy a domain until the portfolio was more complete anyway, so I decided to wait.February 2020: the blog content and management setup were ready, but Notion still had no official feature or concrete timeline. I began looking into the workarounds other people used to connect custom domains to Notion pages.
February 16, 2020: Purchased the custom domain sanghyo.xyz
I bought the domain for two years at a fairly low price, about $13 after entering a discount code.
💡 If you search carefully, you can often find a provider-specific coupon before buying a domain. It is worth checking immediately before payment. My search terms were: LINK
Using the first two posts as references, I followed these steps.
- Create a Cloudflare account.
- Add the purchased domain to Cloudflare.
- In the
DNStab, follow the guide and clickAdd record→CNAME→Name (www)→Content (sanghyo.xyz)→Save.
- Scroll down and copy the nameservers.
- On the registrar's DNS management page, choose
Add Nameserver, paste the copied nameservers, and remove the old ones. - Return to Cloudflare and go to
Workers→Manage Workers→ paste the code and domain values →Save & Deploy→Add route. See the screenshot for my route.
- It did not work.
Result
Success!
- The day after it began working, I noticed that Cloudflare's Overview tab also provided basic analytics.
Outro
For a beginner with little understanding of domain purchasing and hosting, this was a demanding journey. I never fully answered the question, “Why did the guide not work for me?” Still, I was relieved that one of the approaches shared online did. My thanks to everyone who documented how to connect a custom domain to Notion.
ⓒ 2020. SangHyo Yee, All Rights Reserved.
