Adding a Custom Domain to a Notion Blog

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.

Thumbnail for the Notion custom-domain guide

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.

Process

As noted above, I planned to buy a domain only after the site content was sufficiently developed. By February 2020, it felt like the right time to connect one, so I looked into the details.

www.domain.com

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.

Domain.com checkout during the sanghyo.xyz purchase

Confirmation of the sanghyo.xyz domain purchase

💡 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

To connect the domain to Notion, I searched for firsthand accounts and how-to posts. More people had tried it than I expected.

Setting Up a Minimalist Blog with Notion How to set up a custom domain for your homepage in Notion Changing your domain nameservers to Cloudflare notion.so custom domain Can you create a public page and use a custom domain?

Legacy reference block from an external workspace

Using the first two posts as references, I followed these steps.

Create a Cloudflare account.
Add the purchased domain to Cloudflare.

In the DNS tab, follow the guide and click Add record → CNAME → Name (www) → Content (sanghyo.xyz) → Save.

Creating a CNAME record in Cloudflare DNS

Scroll down and copy the nameservers.

Cloudflare nameserver values to copy to the registrar

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.

For some reason, my button said Manage Workers instead of Launch editor.

It did not work.

Problem

I had bought the domain and followed the guide, but the redirect still failed. Did I need to pay separately for hosting?
Finding another guide seemed faster than trying to reverse-engineer the code.
Another search turned up one more account, so I tried again by changing only the code; the overall process was very similar.

Connecting a Domain to a Public Notion Page

Result

Success!

Moves in Design

The day after it began working, I noticed that Cloudflare's Overview tab also provided basic analytics.

Cloudflare overview analytics after the domain was connected

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.