Every Traveling Portrait site starts life at yourname.travelingportrait.com — live the moment you pick a template, no setup required. For a lot of photographers, that's plenty. But if you already own a domain, or want your gallery to live at the same address as the rest of your business, Pro and Studio plans can connect it directly.
Connecting a domain doesn't move your site anywhere — it just gives it a second address. From your dashboard, you enter the domain you want to use, and we hand you back a single CNAME record to add at your domain registrar. Once that record is in place, your existing gallery, photos, and template show up there automatically.
SSL used to be the annoying part of "bring your own domain" — generating a certificate, installing it, renewing it before it quietly expired. We don't make you do any of that. Once your CNAME is live, we provision and renew the certificate automatically, and your dashboard shows a status badge — verified, pending, or needs attention — so you always know exactly where things stand. A "Check status" button re-checks it on demand instead of making you wait and refresh.
If your domain is something like yourname.com rather than www.yourname.com, there's a real DNS limitation worth knowing about: the CNAME record type we use can't be attached directly to a root domain, only to a subdomain like www. Most registrars offer a "domain forwarding" option to bridge that gap — we walk you through it in the dashboard rather than leaving you to figure it out from a support forum.
Custom domains involve real, ongoing infrastructure on our side — DNS checks, certificate renewal, routing — for a feature that matters most to photographers who are further along in treating their site as a real business address. It's one of a few things we reserve for Pro and Studio, alongside things like client proofing galleries and gallery analytics.
Once it's connected, there's nothing else to think about — your domain just works, the same way travelingportrait.com does for us.