Custom domain for your digital cards: how to connect your own domain
With a custom domain, your digital cards live at cards.yourcompany.com instead of card-qr.com. What to prepare before starting, how your domain moves from pending to active, and what to do when something goes wrong.
With a custom domain, your digital cards stop living at card-qr.com/c/your-name and start being served from a domain with your own brand — for example cards.yourcompany.com. It's an Enterprise feature: you add it from the Domains panel, verify it by DNS, and the SSL certificate is issued and renewed automatically.
Why it matters for a business
A card on a generic domain works perfectly for a professional who hands out their own card. For a company with dozens or hundreds of employees, a custom domain changes two things at once: branding and SEO. Branding, because the link that appears in the QR code, in your email signature, or on the printed physical card carries your company name, not the name of the platform behind it. SEO, because all the authority Google distributes among links to your cards — the ones people paste on their website, on LinkedIn, in directories — accumulates in a single canonical URL under your own domain, instead of being scattered across dozens of loose links to card-qr.com that only strengthen us.
There's an additional effect, harder to measure but equally real: trust. A salesperson who shows cards.yourcompany.com in a meeting conveys that they're part of a company with its own infrastructure. The same card at card-qr.com/c/john-smith-83421 works perfectly fine, but it doesn't say the same thing about who's behind it.
What to prepare before starting
Before entering the panel, it's good to have three things decided:
- Access to DNS management for your domain — Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, IONOS, or whoever you use. Without the ability to add records there, verification isn't possible.
- Root domain or subdomain of your own domain. You can connect your full domain (
yourcompany.com) or a subdomain of yours (cards.yourcompany.com). The typical approach is the latter: leave your corporate website where it is and reserve a separate address just for your cards. - Who manages your DNS. In a mid-size company, the person requesting the digital card doesn't manage the domain — IT or the web agency does. Identify that person before setting up the domain: you'll need them in the next step.
How to connect it
- Go to Domains in the panel and open "Add domain".
- Enter your custom domain or subdomain and confirm. The system automatically generates the DNS records you need: an A record with the server IP and a TXT record for ownership verification.
- Add those records in your DNS provider. The panel includes step-by-step instructions for Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Google Domains — copy and paste each value exactly as it appears.
- Wait for propagation. It depends on your provider and the TTL of the previous record; it can take anywhere from minutes to several hours.
- Verify the domain from the Domains list. The system checks the TXT and that the domain points to the server separately; if something fails, it tells you which one.
From start to finish, including DNS propagation — the part CardQR doesn't control — the process usually completes the same day. What we handle (generating records, checking the TXT and pointing, issuing the certificate) takes minutes; the rest is waiting for your provider to distribute the change across the internet, something that neither CardQR nor you can speed up directly.
What happens inside: from pending to active
The domain goes through a sequence of states, each one visible in the panel:
- Pending verification: you just added it, waiting for you to set up the DNS.
- DNS verified: the TXT and A record are already correct, ready for the certificate.
- Provisioning SSL: the system is requesting the certificate and setting up the server configuration. It's automatic, you don't need to do anything.
- Active: SSL issued, domain operational. From here on your cards are served from it.
Verification is per record, not an opaque all-or-nothing: the TXT and domain pointing are checked separately, so if only one fails, the panel tells you exactly which one is missing.
If the SSL certificate fails on the first attempt — the most common reason is that DNS propagation hasn't quite finished — the domain is marked for retry without you needing to set anything up again: you press retry and the system tries again. There's a limit of five attempts; if you exhaust them, you need to review your DNS configuration before continuing. Once the certificate is active, it also renews itself — as the expiration date approaches it enters renewal state and the system manages it without you needing to touch anything.
And it's not just the day you set it up: once the domain is active, the system keeps checking periodically that DNS continues pointing where it should. If someone changes a record without warning months later, it gets detected.
The panel also limits how many times you can press verify in a row — up to ten attempts, with a one-hour wait if you exhaust them without success — so that repeated frantic checking doesn't overwhelm your own DNS or ours while you wait for propagation.
Which cards use the domain, and what happens to the old ones
You can only have one active domain per account at a time — to change it, you have to delete the current one first. Once active, all your cards and your team's cards are served from it. If someone opens one of those cards by its old URL at card-qr.com, it automatically redirects to your custom domain: there aren't two different URLs competing for the same content in search results.
Common issues
| Issue | Common cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Verification fails right after adding the records | DNS propagation hasn't finished yet | Wait and retry verification in 15-30 minutes |
| The TXT never verifies | The value was copied incomplete, with extra spaces, or in the wrong record name | Copy the exact value from the panel without editing it, in the exact record name it indicates |
| SSL fails several times in a row with Cloudflare | Cloudflare's orange proxy is active — the record points to Cloudflare, not to our server | Put the record in "DNS only" mode (gray cloud) while it verifies and the certificate is issued |
| It takes a long time to propagate | The previous record's TTL was high (an hour or more) | Lower the TTL to 300 seconds before the change if your provider allows it, or wait for the old TTL to expire |
Frequently asked questions
Can I have more than one custom domain?
No. Each Enterprise account has a single active domain at a time. To change it, you have to delete the current one and set up the new one.
What happens if my SSL certificate expires?
It shouldn't expire: the system renews it automatically before the deadline. If something prevents renewal, the domain enters a state that flags it so you can review it.
Do I need to touch anything on my server?
No. CardQR manages all server and certificate configuration once you verify the DNS; you just add the records in your provider.
Does the domain apply only to my account or also to my team?
It applies to the entire account: your team members' cards are also served from the account owner's active domain.