A domain name (e.g. www.example.co.uk) is also known as a 'website address’ or ‘URL’.
The default domain name you will have on AChurchNearYou.com will be a string of numbers, so something like achurchnearyou.com/church/12345 or achurchnearyou.com/benefice/12-345A
To find out what yours is, look up your church on AChurchNearYou.com and look at what appears in the address bar of your browser.
You can also set up a different, custom domain name that includes the name of your church or benefice and forwards to the default address.
Free custom domain names
You can contact us and ask for an alternative AChurchNearYou.com domain name with your church name in it, which we provide in the format achurchnearyou.com/all-saints-millington. We can do this for you so that it forwards to your default domain name.
Using an existing domain name
If your church already has a website address and you want to start using AChurchNearYou.com as your main church website, you can forward it to your AChurchNearYou.com site, see instructions below.
Purchasing an external domain name
You can purchase a new custom website address, for example, ‘allsaintschurchmillington.org’ from any domain name provider, and set it to forward to your AChurchNearYou.com website address.
If you do not yet have a custom domain, there are many providers from which you can purchase a domain.
Some of the popular domain providers are:
Once you have purchased your domain name, you can forward it to your AChurchNearYou.com site, see instructions below.
Maintaining your domain name if you purchase a custom domain name
Domain names are purchased on a subscription basis. Check when the next payment is due to maintain the forwarding service. If you let your subscription lapse, someone else could purchase it and point it to a website about something completely different. Sometimes people do this maliciously and point church website domains to gambling sites or similar. Make sure your subscription is set to auto renew, if possible, to avoid this problem.
Forwarding a custom domain name to AChurchNearYou.com
- Go to your church’s AChurchNearYou.com homepage and copy the address that shows in your browser - it starts with https://achurchnearyou.com/ and ends with a series of digits.
- Go to your domain provider’s website and log in to your account. Your domain provider is the company from which the website address was purchased.
- Follow the instructions from your domain provider to forward your web address to your AChurchNearYou.com site.
Once this has been done you will no longer need to maintain your existing website.
Forwarding instructions for common domain providers
For other providers please visit their support or help section for guidance.