MadsPad: How To Set Up a Top Level Domain in Blogger

Before setting up a TLD or a custom domain name for your Blogger site, you have to prepare a good address or link to your site. I strongly recommend to prepare the best name or compose of words that are significant and meaningful for you. May use name that also ends with (.com) that is being used also nowadays and social media users more familiar with the domain name that ends with .com, nice example for this would be my custom domain site which is madspad.com

Supposedly, you have your blogspot site ready-made from Blogger that is running and with good content as possible as well as with your domain name source is accessible to you. Let's say for example I chose Name cheap as my domain registrar, however, you may also consider GoDaddy, Hostgator, Wordpress and many more sources of TLD. After deciding what to use and domain name.

Everything starts with buying a Domain name. My best advice for this step is to always choose the good quality and reviews of a certain domain name resource. In fact, you can have your own custom domain for 10-15$ for a year so once you have decided go to the chosen domain (see the list of domain registrars). You might want to read why I choose Namecheap

Head over to your blogger profile. Go to Settings->Basic and go straight Publishing section.

Hover to 'Blog Address, choose 'Setup a 3rd party URL' for your blogspot blog.

Click on + Setup a 3rd party URL for your blog' and there you may add the chosen domain name that you have purchased. Please see screenshot below and take note of the triple w that you have to put to the text box along with your domain name blog address.

Tick the checkbox for your blogspot site to be redirected to your new custom domain name site.

Your visitor may view your site starting with https for the encrypted connection. You may change the drop-down to yes or no by your preferences on HTTPS section. After filling the important fields upon clicking the save button, you will encounter an error 12 and your own 2 CNAMEs that you'll need to enter later for your chosen domain name registrar.

After this step, you can go straight to the address of Domain name source wherein you can set up your DOMAIN credentials, and what you'll input there is the Name, Lable or Host field that blogger provided you in your settings. So now you may see the following steps on how I set up CNAME and A record at chosen Registrar of a custom domain that is at Namecheap.

Setting up CNAME Record and 4 A Records. Login your credentials to access your Domain Control Panel. Hover to the Account Tab and choose the submenu 'Dashboard'. Or you may directly choose the ' Domain List' on the sidebar.

Click the MANAGE button, then proceed to the 'Advance DNS' tab. See below image for reference:

As you can see, I wrote a blue pen for privacy reasons. Going back to the blogger settings a while ago, you'll see 'View settings instruction' you may view it to get the 4 A records. For the CNAME record, you need to input the 'Host' field from blogger settings to the Host column in your Namecheap settings. Same with the 'Destination, Target, or Points To' field from Blogger that you'll input into the 'Value' column. The image says where to put the important fields.

Note that the value of the CNAME record usually ends with googlehosted.com.