Skip to content
← Help center

Website & documents

Bring your own domain

Connect your club’s domain and understand verification and activation.

Club staff · 2 min read

Follow these steps at your club’s own website. Available screens and actions depend on your account’s role and the programs your club has enabled.

Overview

Your club always has a Swim Ops address (<your-club>.swimops.app). If you also want the platform to serve a hostname on a domain you own. For example members.yourclub.org: you point that one hostname at Swim Ops. You keep your domain, your registrar, and your DNS. Swim Ops never asks for nameservers or registrar access, and the rest of your DNS (email, your existing website) is untouched.

What you choose

Pick the hostname you want the platform to serve, typically a subdomain such as members.yourclub.org or pool.yourclub.org. Apex domains (yourclub.org with no prefix) are possible only if your DNS provider supports CNAME flattening / ALIAS records at the apex. A subdomain is simpler and what we recommend.

What happens

  1. Tell your Swim Ops contact the hostname. We register it on our side and send back exactly two DNS records to create:

    • a CNAME for the hostname itself, pointing at the Swim Ops origin we give you;

    • a TXT record that proves domain ownership and lets our provider issue the TLS certificate. (Depending on the provider's current validation flow this may instead be a second CNAME. The instructions we send are authoritative.)

  2. You (or whoever manages your DNS) create those records with your DNS provider. Nothing else in your zone changes.

  3. Certificate issuance and activation are automatic once the records are visible: usually minutes, up to a few hours with slow DNS TTLs. We confirm when the hostname is live, and member links, sign-in emails, and payment return URLs switch to it if it is made canonical.

It really is only those two records — signing in does not add a third. Members can sign in with Google on your domain, and that needs no Google-side registration of your hostname and nothing extra in your zone. Sign-in is handed off to a Swim Ops host behind the scenes and returns the member to your domain; Google is never told your domain name. That is why onboarding a new hostname is a DNS change on your side and nothing else.

Removing it later

Delete the two records and tell us to release the hostname. Your <your-club>.swimops.app address keeps working throughout.