🌍 Custom domains

Put your documentation or your forms on your own address, such as docs.yourcompany.com or forms.yourcompany.com, instead of NoteMaker's. Owners and admins manage domains under Settings → Domains.

The Domains page appears when your administrator has turned custom domains on and your plan includes them.

Two kinds of domain

A docs domain serves one published collection as a documentation site.
A forms domain serves published forms: one home form at the root, and the others at their own paths.

Both kinds count toward the same limit, which your plan sets. The top of the page shows how many you have used, for example "1 of 3 used".

Before you start

For a docs domain, publish the collection first, from its Share window. Each collection can have one domain.
For a forms domain, publish the form first. Each form can sit on one domain.
Use a name you control, and decide where it will live, for example a subdomain like docs.

Add a domain

Open Settings → Domains and find Add a domain.
Choose what it serves: a docs domain or a forms domain.
Type the hostname, for example docs.example.com.
For a docs domain choose the Published collection and, if you like, a Home page. Without one, the domain shows the collection index. For a forms domain choose the Home form.
Choose Add domain.

Point your DNS at NoteMaker

The new domain shows two records to create at your DNS provider, each with a copy button:

Type	Name	Value
CNAME	your hostname	the address shown on the page
TXT	`_notemaker.` followed by your hostname	`notemaker-verify=` and a code shown on the page

NoteMaker then checks for them by itself and updates the status:

Waiting for DNS: the records are not visible yet. DNS can take a while to spread. Choose Check now to look again straight away.
Verified: both records were found.
Issuing certificate: NoteMaker is getting a secure certificate for the name.
Active: the domain works.
Failed: the domain was not verified after about three days. Fix the records at your DNS provider, then choose Retry on the domain.

NoteMaker also re-checks an active domain every day. If your records go missing for several days in a row, the domain goes back to Waiting for DNS until they are restored.

💡

Turn off proxying at your DNS provider while you set up. A name that is routed through a proxy, such as Cloudflare's orange cloud, cannot be verified.

What visitors get

Once a domain is Active:

The old /c/…, /p/… and /f/… addresses on NoteMaker redirect to it.
A docs domain gets readable page addresses taken from the page titles, a search box (Ctrl+K), previous and next links at the end of each page, and a sitemap and robots.txt for search engines. Each page also has a plain Markdown version, by adding .md to its address, and the site has an llms.txt file for AI tools.
A docs domain shows one collection. Its sub-collections are not shown, so build the site as top-level section pages with the articles as their sub-pages.

Manage a domain

Home page. Change which page a docs domain opens on.
Forms on this domain. Add more published forms, set each form's path, choose Make home for another form, or remove one. Removing a form puts it back at its /f/… address on NoteMaker.
Page address. A page's own address can be edited in its Share window, by the page's author or an admin.

Old addresses keep redirecting after you rename a page or change a path, so existing links keep working.

If your plan changes

If a plan stops including custom domains, the domains are kept but stop working until the plan includes them again. NoteMaker's own addresses always keep working.

Custom domains