Your domain, and your email
The domain
You buy a domain from a registrar — anyone; we do not sell them and take no cut — and point it at your host. Roughly £10–15 a year.
On the one-click route, your host's dashboard has a Domains panel that tells you exactly which two records to add at your registrar, then waits for them. It usually takes minutes and can take a day.
Nothing you have written is affected. Your old .vercel.app address keeps working.
Email is optional, and that is a real choice
The site works with no email configured at all. What changes:
Works either way
- The contact form. Messages are stored on the server and appear in Messages in your admin.
- Everything about editing and publishing.
Needs email
- Being told an enquiry arrived. Without it, you have to open the admin to notice. If you check once a day that is fine. If you are advertising for work it is not.
- Resetting a forgotten passphrase. Without email there is no reset. Losing the passphrase means losing access, and the only way back is somebody with access to the database.
- Newsletter sign-ups. Confirming a sign-up means emailing somebody a link. Without a mail server the form tells visitors honestly that it is not working.
Connecting one
Services → Email. You need a host, a port, a username and a password from your mail provider. Most providers publish these on a page called something like "SMTP settings".
Press Test. It tells you in plain words what is wrong — wrong password, wrong port, host not answering — rather than showing you an error code.
Two notes worth having:
- Use a provider built for sending, not your personal mailbox. Sending from a personal Gmail account through its SMTP tends to get throttled, and it puts your own account at risk if the form is abused.
- The address it sends from should match a domain you control, or the notifications will go to spam.