Connect website to Shopify

Would you like to run your online shop on Shopify but keep your domain and your e-mail addresses with FireStorm? No problem. You do not have to transfer the domain to Shopify. It is enough to point the website to Shopify in the DNS entries of your domain. Your mailboxes keep working unchanged.

What you need

When you connect an existing domain in Shopify (under «Settings», «Domains», «Connect existing domain»), Shopify shows you the entries you have to set. Usually these are:

• an A record for the main domain pointing to a Shopify IPv4 address
• an AAAA record for the main domain pointing to a Shopify IPv6 address
• a CNAME record for www pointing to shops.myshopify.com

Always copy the values exactly as Shopify shows them to you.

How to enter the records

1. Log in to the customer centre at admin.firestorm.ch and open the DNS entries of your domain. The article Change DNS entries explains how.
2. Find the A record for the main domain. Its name is your domain without www (for example example.ch). Click the pencil icon and replace the IP address with the Shopify IPv4 address.
3. Do the same with the AAAA record for the main domain and enter the Shopify IPv6 address there.
4. If there is already an A or AAAA record for www, delete it. Then use «Add entry» to create a CNAME record with the name www and the target shops.myshopify.com. Apart from the CNAME, no other record may exist for www.
5. Save the changes.

This is what the three records look like afterwards. The addresses in the picture are examples, the values from your Shopify account are what counts.

The three records for Shopify (highlighted in yellow), the records for e-mail remain unchanged

What you must not change

Leave all other records as they are, especially the MX record, the TXT records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), the record with the asterisk (*) and any records for mail and webmail. Otherwise your e-mail addresses or the webmail stop working.

And then?

Click «Verify connection» in Shopify. It can take a few hours until the change has reached everywhere, in rare cases up to 24 hours. Shopify then issues the SSL certificate for your shop automatically.

Difference to changing the name servers

Some providers recommend switching the name servers entirely to them. In that case your e-mails are redirected too, and your mailboxes at FireStorm are no longer reachable. If you want to keep your e-mails with us, only change the individual records as described above. The same applies to other providers such as Squarespace, Wix or Jimdo, which also give you A and CNAME records.

If you get stuck, we are happy to enter the records for you: DNS change request (chargeable).