I wanted to transfer a UK (.co.uk) domain away from Squarespace and decided that Cloudflare would be a good domain registrar to use. Along the way I encountered a few bumps in the road, and a few gotchas, but eventually I got there.
Read on to find out how to avoid my mistakes!
Why I moved to Cloudflare
I used to use Google Domains for my domain name registrations, as they were competitively priced and offered DNS and free email forwarding. Sadly, Google sold the domains business to Squarespace in 2023, and all of my domains got transferred over in 2024. You can read about why I don’t like Squarespace for domains here.
Cloudflare UK domain costs
I couldn’t find out how much Cloudflare charges for UK domains. For others such as .com they said that they didn’t charge a fee over and above the wholesale registry fee. I presumed that they would do the same for UK domains or at least not charge any more than other registrars.
I was later pleasantly surprised to have been charged $4.94 (around £3.85) for a one-year renewal, which I believe is Nominet’s wholesale registry fee (adjusted for currency conversion).
Cloudflare account creation
This was straightforward, give your username and choose a password, enter your contact details etc… Once you log in there is a lot going on at the busy account home page. Cloudflare offer a lot of services! For now we’re just interested in transferring a .co.uk domain in.
Domain registration
On the menu there’s a section for “Domain Registration”. There’s a “Transfer Domains” option and so I chose that, expecting to enter my domain name and checkout from there. No this is actually where you go later on in the process.
Add your website
After looking at the help documentation I figured out that I had to “add” my domain to Cloudflare before I could initiate a transfer. You do this by clicking “Websites” at the top of the menu, and following the instructions to add your website/domain. Choose the free plan.
So then I tried to transfer the domain again. Nope! Something’s still missing.
Point your name servers to Cloudflare
Maybe I didn’t read the details on the home page for my newly set up “Website”, or maybe it wasn’t very clear. Either way, you need to go to your existing registrar and point your domain’s name servers to the ones that Cloudflare specify on the “Website” home page. At this point also go into the “DNS” menu and check that Cloudflare has imported all of your existing DNS records before you re-point your name servers because from that point onwards the Cloudflare DNS will be used.
Transfer domain
At this point when you go back to the “Website” home page you should see that any warnings have disappeared and down the right of the page there is an option under “Domain Registration” to transfer your domain in.
Follow that link and complete the checkout process. You don’t have to pay a fee to transfer UK domain in to Cloudflare, although you’ll need to add a payment method.
The page will inform you that after completing the checkout process you then need to go to your current registrar and update the domain’s IPS tag to “CLOUDFLARE”.
And that’s about it
After a short time, determined by the speed of your current registrar, the domain will transfer over to Cloudflare and on the “Website” home page you should see that the registrant has been updated to Cloudflare.
Watch out for a renewal!
I’m fairly sure that when setting up the “Website” the “Auto-renew” option was off. However, the day after transferring my domain name in I woke up to an email from 5AM confirming that my domain name had been renewed! Upon logging in to Cloudflare I can see that the “Auto-renew” option is now set to on. Maybe I was mistaken earlier, or maybe it gets turned on when you successfully transfer the domain name in. Either way, I guess that because my domain name was around 3 weeks from expiry, and Cloudflare auto-renews a month in advance, it decided to renew it overnight.
No problem, as I was going to renew it anyway, and the cost was an extremely competitive $4.94 (around £3.85) for a one-year renewal. There is also the option to extend the registration within the Cloudflare control panel.