Link Cloudflare connected domain to Squarespace

You can add Cloudflare to your Squarespace website for additional features. While most Squarespace websites don’t need Cloudflare services due to Squarespace's provision of free SSL certificates, content backup, and high-traffic ready infrastructure, some may benefit from extra features provided by Cloudflare. Here is a step-by-step guide to using Cloudflare with your Squarespace website.

In this particular use case, we will connect a Cloudflare zone to a Squarespace site as a third-party domain. The domain’s registrar is Namecheap, and Cloudflare has been connected as the DNS manager.

Connect a Cloudflare zone to your site

I dig into these tutorials from both Squarespace and Cloudflare

• Using Cloudflare with Squarespace

• Connecting a third-party domain to your Squarespace Site

• Vendor-specific DNS records - Squarespace

While Squarespace generally recommends using the DNS-only mode and turning off proxying on Cloudflare (disabling the orange cloud icon) to prevent potential issues, I'm opting to follow Cloudflare's advice. This involves proxying all records except the verify.squarespace.com CNAME, which should remain DNS-only.

Step 1: Connect domain to Squarespace

From your Squarespace dashboard, open Settings - Domains & Email

• Open the Domains panel.

• Click Use a Domain I Own.

• Enter the domain name you want to connect in the Enter Domain field, then click the arrow, eg: beyondspace.info

• Click Connect Domain.

Step-by-step included

13 STEPS

1. Open Squarespace dashboard - Click Settings

2. Click Domains & Email

3. Click Domains

4. Click Use a Domain I Own

5. Type your domain, e.g. example.com

6. Click Arrow

7. Click Connect Domain

8. Click No, use dns records

9. Click Select Provider

10. Choose your domain registrar, eg: Namecheap

11. Click Connect Domain

12. Click Continue

13. That's it. You're done first part of domain connecting to Squarespace.

Here's an interactive tutorial

** Best experienced in Full Screen (click the icon in the top right corner before you begin) **

https://www.iorad.com/player/2412792/Squarespace---How-to-connect-3rd-party-domain

Next step

Step 2 - Review your DNS settings

After pressing Continue on the previous step you will land on the DNS settings page, keep it open for reference, you will need to enter these DNS records into Cloudflare in order to connect domain to the site. At the moment all the DNS records are not found, this is expected

Step 3 - Add DNS records to DNS manager

Open a new tab to login to Cloudflare dashboard, which is your current DNS manager, and start enter the all the DNS records to Cloudflare DNS manager, the details steps are slightly different from what Squarespace suggested, is is proved working on Cloudflare documentations

• All A records should be Proxied

• The CNAME record for www should also be Proxied.

• The CNAME record for verify.squarespace.com should be DNS-only.

3.1 - Add first CNAME records

Alias or Host Name	Type or Record Type	Points to
Copy nique code under Host on the first line.	CNAME or CNAME Alias	verify.squarespace.com

Add new DNS record in Cloudflare

• Type: CNAME

• Name: Copy the unique code under Host column in Squarespace DNS

• Target: verify.squarespace.com

• Proxy status: DNS only (by toggle the Proxy status switch)

3.2 - Add the second CNAME Record

Alias or Host Name	Type or Record Type	Points to
www	CNAME or CNAME Alias	ext-cust.squarespace.com

Add new DNS record in Cloudflare

• Type: CNAME

• Name: www

• Target: ext-cust.squarespace.com

• Proxy status: Proxied (by toggle the Proxy status switch)

3.3 - Add all A records

Start adding all four A records in Cloudflare DNS, copy the exact value given in Squarespace DNS screen, for example

Host or Host Name	Records, Record Type, or Type	Points To or Details
@	A	198.185.159.144
@	A	198.185.159.145
@	A	198.49.23.144
@	A	198.49.23.145

Add following A records in Cloudflare

• Type: A

• Name: @

• Target: given IP in target

• Proxy status: Proxied (by toggle the Proxy status switch)

Step 4: Wait for the DNS records to propagate

It might take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for the connection to begin working correctly. In the meantime, you can check on the connection's status and domain settings in the Domain overview panel.

Review domain connection

After some time, my new domain now can connect to Squarespace website, if you check the domain DNS in Squarespace, there will be some error like below, acording to Cloudflare, it is expected and you can use the Cloudflare services now

For this particular use case, the new domain added will be redirected to Squarespace primary domain, which is default Squarespace behavior, to check if the domain has connected to Cloudflare or not I used the tool from Selesti for that matter

• Secondary domain check - Cloudflare connect

• Primary domain check - Not connect to Cloudflare

What can we do with Cloudflare

Since the secondary domain will be redirect to primary one, I did not have much chance to test all the feature, but some notable info like:

• Cloudflare Worker HTMLRewriter does not seem to work with Worker Routes

• Redirects rules works: now Cloudflare sit between my domain and the visitors, and I can redirect the traffic to different domain other than the primary domain.

• Zone-level Web Application Firewall (WAF) works, I can block visitor from certain IPs or countries

And that all I know for now, next I will migrate my primary domain of this website to Cloudflare and write an article, stay tuned!