Domain Issues with https and www when pointing at Blogger - Solved

Domain Issues with https and www when pointing at Blogger - Solved

It has been a busy week setting up everything on VirginiaWaytes.com, but I think we are finally there, my Lovelies. Do let me know if you bump into any issues - thank you 💖.

One of the strangest problems that reared it's head was when I pointed my shiny new domain name at Blogger, who are the lovely people who host this site. Mostly everything was lovely, but one part did not function as expected:

• http://virginiawaytes.com worked
• http://www.virginiawaytes.com worked
• https://www.virginiawaytes.com worked
• https://virginiawaytes.com returned an error

As you can imagine, this was somewhat perplexing. At first I assumed it was our VPN playing silly whatsits, as it occasionally does, but alas, that was not the case. However, it did lead me to discovering WooRank.com, which is a great free service where we can check such things. It does a lot more than that, but after putting in a URL for them to check, we can scroll down to the section called "Indexing" and it will tell us if anything is wrong.

Just to be clear, this website has  "HTTPS availability" and "HTTPS redirect" turned on so everyone's browsing experience is safe and secure.

I used these instructions to point my domain at Blogger: Google's Domain Instructions

This means that after putting in our domain name on Blogger, we will see this:

Under the black bars on the image is information specific to our Google account and will be individual, but it will be in the same place.

We then have to go to our domain name provider and put in the following record into the CNAME section - wherever that happens to be for them:

Host Name	Type	Result
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
Bit under black box	CNAME	Other bit under black box
www	CNAME	ghs.google.com

And we have to set up out domain forward to point to our Blogger URL (e.g. in my case virginiasparlour.blogspot.com).

However, when I did this the first time, as I said above, everything worked except the https:// without the www.

Thanks to this article: Solved GoDaddy Domain Not Working without WWW in Blogger I managed to figure out the solution, even though my domain is with Names.co.uk not GoDaddy.

Turns out the following steps fix the issue:

• Remove the A records above and save.
• Put the A records back in and save (this refreshes the DNS records).
• Take out the domain forwarding.
• Put the domain forwarding back in making sure all domain version forward the same way.

It can take up to 48 to propagate, but it took mine less than a minute and everything was popping up correctly.

I do hope this information might be of assistance to anyone stuggling with the same issue.
Best wishes, Lovelies. Stay well.