Connect a Custom Domain to Everything You Can
It's far more important than having a website you "own
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
Own the domain, not the website. I've made that point a few times now. It holds up, at least in my eyes. People will disagree. That's fine.
Either way, if the custom domain is where you're headed, then here's the move that follows from it. Connect a custom domain to everything you can. Because it can make a huge difference, even though it might actually be worse in the beginning.
Hear me out!
Everything you can
Most platforms let you connect a custom domain nowadays.
Substack lets you. Medium lets you, although this has changed back and forth over the years, so I am not actually sure if you can right now. Others do: Ghost, Beehiiv, Gumroad, even a Notion page. Point your own name at each one. It's crucial, and many people don't do it for two reasons:
Domains cost a bit
They don't even know you can
Once you do connect a custom domain, though, the address is "yours". In the sense that you have control over where that domain points.
yourname.com for the writing. Not yourname.substack.com. Not medium.com/@you.
The platform still does the hosting, the design, the sending. You just put your name on the door. And that is a big deal because...
It's Portable
This is the whole point. You can leave any platform and go to the next. And your URLs will follow you.
Say Substack changes something in 2027 you don't like. You move to Ghost. You switch the DNS. Your readers type the same name and land in the same place. The links you spent years building still work. The Google traffic? Stays.
Try that without a domain.
The day you leave, yourname.substack.com is a dead end. Every share, every backlink, every old link sitting in someone's bookmarks, gone to a 404.
That's the "rented land" argument. It's not really true I think, because in the end, everything is rented. A domain too. But the probability of losing it or being banned is lower for a domain than for Medium, for example. People get banned from Medium. They hardly get banned from a domain provider. It's still possible, of course. But rather unlikely.
So in our view now, the domain is the address that stays "yours" when you move out.
SEO
A domain you've held for years collects things.
Backlinks.
Mentions.
Index age.
Google starts to trust it.
yourname.com pointed at Substack beats yourname.substack.com, even with the exact same words behind it. The authority is yours, not the platform's. And when you move, it comes along. (That's most of what I do in Substack SEO, by the way.)
BUT also… in the beginning a new custom domain is obviously much lower ranked than a Substack subdomain. Which means in the beginning, your traffic might actually be worse. That's a risk you must take. Over time though, your custom domain will be the biggest asset.
About that "ownership"
You don't own the domain either. I mentioned it a second ago.
You rent it. Every year, from a registrar, who answers to a registry, who answers to ICANN. Miss one renewal and it might be gone (or even worse, snatched up by someone else who then enjoys all the work you put in).
So when I say "own your domain," I'm cheating a little. You own it about as much as you own your Substack. You rent it from someone further up the chain. The difference is that this particular rental moves with you.
That's the point. Not ownership. Portability.
Higher up
And it goes higher than the registrar.
.com runs through Verisign, an American company, under US jurisdiction. Domains get seized by court order. It has happened plenty of times. Sanctions can cut a whole country out of the naming system.
So if the US wanted to lock a place out tomorrow, and with the current administration that's not the wildest thing to picture, your "owned" .com is one order away from pointing at nothing. Same as the platform. Same as everything else.
At that point nobody owned a thing. We were all renting from the same chain the whole time.
I mean I wouldn't trust Trump with anything. So in that sense, everything I do online is pretty much "rented" and definitely not owned.
The Bottom Line
Connect the custom domain. To all of it. To everything you can.
It's the most movable piece you've got, and switching platforms without losing your address is worth a lot.
Just drop the word own. You're renting a name that lets you change which other thing you're renting. That's a good deal. The best we have right now.
Until the naming system itself goes dark one day. Then it turns out none of us owned anything to begin with.
