Understand how to update nameservers at your domain registrar to successfully activate Cloudflare. This article formerly appeared under the title Step 3: Change your domain nameservers to Cloudflare.

Overview

To route web traffic through the Cloudflare network, update the nameservers at your domain registrar to resolve your domain’s DNS with Cloudflare's nameservers. Updating your nameservers does not change where your website is hosted.  Also, you can still use OpenDNS, Google DNS, etc for recursive DNS although Cloudflare recommends the 1.1.1.1 resolver.

Change your domain nameservers

To change your domain nameservers,

1. Enter your domain at ICANN WHOIS field:

2. Log into the administrator account for your domain registrar.

3. Replace the current nameserver records in your registrar account with your domain’s Cloudflare nameservers. Allow up to 72 hours for nameserver changes to globally propagate.

Contact your registrar's support center for the most accurate information. See below for instructions on changing nameservers at popular registrars:

  fl=4f177
  h=www.example.com
  ip=2001:1900:2200:7525:749f:9ed1:444c:80b4
  ts=1562191016.292
  visit_scheme=https
  uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
  like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36
  colo=SJC
  http=http/2
  loc=US
  tls=TLSv1.3
  sni=plaintext
  warp=off

Contact your registrar's support center for the most accurate information. See below for instructions on changing nameservers at popular registrars:

4. Refresh the Cloudflare Overview app. If Complete your nameserver setup still appears, Perform the following steps:

• Ensure the Name Server output correctly spells the Cloudflare nameservers and confirm Cloudflare's nameservers are the only nameservers listed.
• If the Name Server output is correct, click the Re-check now  button in the Cloudflare Overview app.

5. If Complete your nameserver setup no longer appears in the Cloudflare Overview app, you have successfully updated your nameservers and your domain is active at Cloudflare.

Once your domain is active on Cloudflare, review our best practices for active Cloudflare domains.

If you run into issues, refer to our Troubleshooting FAQ for new Cloudflare customers.

Confirm traffic is proxied to Cloudflare

Some online tools such as GTmetrix don't recognize Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) because we don't operate like a traditional CDN.  Instead, confirm your domain traffic actively proxies through Cloudflare by browsing to https://www.example.com/cdn-cgi/trace. Replace www.example.com with the domain and hostname proxied to Cloudflare.  If proxied to Cloudflare, output similar to the following appears in the browser:

  fl=4f177
  h=www.example.com
  ip=2001:1900:2200:7525:749f:9ed1:444c:80b4
  ts=1562191016.292
  visit_scheme=https
  uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
  like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36
  colo=SJC
  http=http/2
  loc=US
  tls=TLSv1.3
  sni=plaintext
  warp=off

If you don't observe similar output:

1. Confirm your DNS record is orange-clouded in the Cloudflare DNS app,
2. Enter your domain at ICANN WHOIS to confirm the Name Servers only list Cloudflare nameservers for your domain, or
3. Contact Cloudflare Support.

Related resources

• Creating a Cloudflare account and adding a website
• Best practices for active Cloudflare domains
• Troubleshooting FAQ for new Cloudflare customers
• Understanding the Cloudflare dashboard
• Contacting Cloudflare support