Domains

Point your own domain at Fontdue, and send receipts from your own email address

There are two domains Fontdue uses to reach your customers on your behalf – the one customers visit, and the one their receipts arrive from. By default both belong to Fontdue (your-site.fontdue.com and [email protected]). Replacing them with your own domains is a separate DNS setup each: the email domain is self-serve from Settings in the admin, and the custom domain is activated for you by the Fontdue team.

Custom domain

Your Fontdue store lives at your-site.fontdue.com until you connect a custom domain. A custom domain serves the same Fontdue-hosted pages under a domain you own – store.example.com instead of example.fontdue.com.

Custom domains are set up by the Fontdue team rather than from the admin – once your DNS record is in place, contact us and we’ll activate the domain for you.

Connect the custom domain before your site launches – it’s part of going live, not a later upgrade. When your site reaches Fontdue across a fontdue.com address, Safari treats the cart cookie as third-party and blocks it, so customers on Safari and iOS can find that Add to cart does nothing. Serving Fontdue from a subdomain of your own domain makes the cookie first-party, which fixes this.

Choosing a domain

The subdomain to point at Fontdue depends on how your site is built:

  • Fontdue template sites – if your site is built on the Fontdue template, the custom domain becomes your site’s main address. Foundries normally use the www subdomain: www.example.com.
  • Sites that embed Fontdue – if your site lives elsewhere and embeds Fontdue components, your main domain stays where it is, and a dedicated subdomain carries the Fontdue-hosted pages. store is the convention: store.example.com.

In both cases the domain you point at Fontdue is a subdomain. We don’t recommend pointing a root domain (example.com) at Fontdue – DNS for root domains is more restrictive, and you usually want it free for your own site anyway.

How setup works

1 Add a CNAME record

In your DNS provider, add a CNAME record pointing your chosen subdomain at your existing Fontdue URL – example.fontdue.com.

DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, though most providers update within a few minutes.

2 Get in touch

Email us with the domain you’ve pointed at Fontdue.

3 We activate it

We register the domain with our hosting provider. SSL is provisioned automatically. We’ll confirm when the domain is live.

After the domain is live

Once the custom domain is active, update the places that still reference your fontdue.com URL:

  • Sites that embed Fontdue – update the url in your integration code to the new domain, for example fontdue.initialize({ url: "https://store.example.com" }) in a script-tag setup or the url prop on FontdueProvider in a React setup. Also check that your Site URL is filled in with your site’s homepage – customers are redirected there after checkout, and receipt emails link back to it. It isn’t set automatically for embedded sites.
  • Fontdue template sites – nothing to update: as long as the Site URL setting is blank, checkout redirects and receipt links follow your site’s address automatically, custom domain included.11If you’ve filled in Site URL explicitly, update it to the new domain.

If you remove the custom domain later, your store reverts to your-site.fontdue.com. Customers who bookmarked the custom URL will no longer reach you until they’re redirected from somewhere else.

Email domain

By default, Fontdue sends receipt emails from [email protected]. The Email domain tab lets you authenticate your own domain so receipts come from your foundry’s address – [email protected], for example.

Under the hood, Fontdue uses SendGrid for transactional email. Domain authentication involves adding three DNS records so SendGrid can sign emails on your behalf.

1 Enter the email address you want to send from

For example, [email protected]. Fontdue extracts the domain and starts the authentication process with SendGrid.

2 Add the DNS records

Fontdue shows three records you need to add to your DNS provider:

  • One CNAME for email tracking.
  • Two DKIM records for email signing.

The admin has a one-click copy button for each host and value – paste them into your DNS provider as they’re shown.

3 Verify

Click Verify DNS records. Fontdue re-checks them against SendGrid. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, so if verification fails immediately, give it a few minutes (or a few hours) and try again.

4 You're set

Receipt emails now send from the address you entered. You can change the email later as long as it stays on the same verified domain. Removing the domain reverts receipts to [email protected].

Changing or removing the email domain

Once the domain is verified, you can change the Receipt email to any address on the same verified domain without redoing the DNS flow. Changing to an address on a different domain requires re-authenticating that new domain.

To remove the domain entirely, click Remove domain. This clears the SendGrid authentication; receipts go back to sending from [email protected].

1 If you’ve filled in Site URL explicitly, update it to the new domain. ↩