Custom Domains for Links, TreeLinks and Menus

A short link is a promise: click this and you will end up somewhere worth your time. The domain in front of it is what makes that promise believable. bit.ly/3xKw9 asks for trust; go.yourbrand.com/summer already has it.

On any paid ShareCut plan you can put your own subdomain in front of a link, a TreeLink or a digital menu. Your customers see your brand end to end — the dashboard, the analytics and the QR codes stay here.

What a custom domain actually does

You connect a subdomain you own — menu.yourbrand.com, go.yourbrand.com, links.yourbrand.com — to one specific link you created. From that moment, the root of that host serves that page: a restaurant menu, a link-in-bio page, or a redirect to wherever your short link points.

That one-to-one binding is on purpose. A domain is a promise about a destination, not a namespace to be shared — so menu.yourbrand.com serves your menu and nothing else, and you always know exactly what a customer scanning your QR code will land on.

Everything else keeps working as before. The page stays reachable on its sharecut.site short URL, the statistics keep accruing to the same link, and the QR codes you already printed keep resolving.

Setting one up: three steps

You add a domain from the link it will serve, so the binding is never ambiguous. Open the link in the Link Studio, go to the Custom domain tab, and:

1. Enter your subdomain — for example menu.yourbrand.com. We save it as pending and give you the exact record to create.
2. Create the CNAME in your DNS provider (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Aruba, Namecheap — all the same): a CNAME record pointing your subdomain at sharecut.netlify.app.
3. Hit Verify DNS. Once we can see the record, the domain is attached and an HTTPS certificate is issued automatically. No key to paste, no renewal to remember.

DNS propagation usually takes minutes, occasionally longer. If verification fails, the message tells you what we actually saw — for instance a CNAME pointing somewhere else — rather than a generic error.

If your DNS provider flattens CNAMEs

Some setups, notably Cloudflare with the orange cloud enabled, proxy or flatten CNAME records so that a lookup returns an IP address instead of the target. For those zones there is a second route: create a TXT record at _sharecut-verify.yourdomain.com with the token shown next to your pending domain. Either proof is enough.

Why we ask for proof at all

It would be easier to check that a domain simply resolves somewhere and call it verified. We do not, and it is worth explaining why: that check proves nothing about ownership. Any subscriber could register domains they do not control and have us serve pages on them. Both accepted proofs — the CNAME and the TXT token — require write access to the DNS zone, which is the only thing that actually demonstrates control.

The same reasoning applies to the target: a domain can only be pointed at a link that belongs to your own account. Otherwise someone could serve — and collect analytics on — a page they do not own.

Subdomains, not apex domains

Connect menu.yourbrand.com, not yourbrand.com. Apex domains cannot carry a standard CNAME record, and the workarounds vary by provider in ways that break quietly at the worst moment. A subdomain also leaves your main site untouched, which is almost always what you want: your website stays where it is, and the menu or link-in-bio lives on its own host.

What happens when a subscription ends

Custom domains are a paid feature, and the entitlement is checked on every single request, not once at setup. Gating only at setup time would let a white-label survive a cancellation indefinitely — which would be a bug, not a favour.

If the plan lapses, the domain stops serving your branded page and visitors are redirected to the ShareCut short URL for the same content, marked noindex so search engines do not index the fallback. Nothing is deleted: your link, your page and your statistics are intact, and the branded host resumes the moment the subscription is active again.

Deleting the link does the tidy thing too. As covered in our last update, deletion detaches the domain alias before removing the link, so you are never left with a host attached to a page that no longer exists.

Limits and plans

• Up to five custom domains per account.
• Available on Pro, Restaurant and Business — see the plans.
• One domain serves one link; point as many different subdomains at as many different links as you like, within the limit.
• A domain already connected to another account cannot be claimed — the first verified owner keeps it.

Who this is really for

Restaurants get the clearest win: a QR code on the table that opens menu.trattoria-rossi.com reads as the restaurant's own menu, because it is. Print it once, change the dishes as often as you like — the menu is dynamic behind a static code.

Creators and small brands get the same effect on a TreeLink: a link-in-bio on your own domain instead of a shared platform host, with the analytics still in one place.

And for campaigns, a branded short link measurably outperforms a generic one for the simple reason that people can see where it goes before clicking.

Ready to set one up? Open any link in the Link Studio from your dashboard, or start with a free dynamic QR code and add the domain when you upgrade.