Everything verifies except the bare domain

If every record has verified except the one on the root of your domain, your DNS provider almost certainly cannot answer for the root, and no amount of waiting or re-checking will change it. Work down this list before accepting that, because two ordinary mistakes look identical to it.

Issue Mint recognises this case on its own. When www has verified, the bare domain has not, and everything else that counts has, the domain tab says your registrar cannot point the domain at us and offers www.yourdomain.com as your address instead.

Can your provider put a CNAME at the root at all?

The root of a domain carries records that a CNAME is not allowed to sit beside, so no provider can store the record Issue Mint asks for literally. What separates them is whether they work round it.

Most do, by resolving our target themselves and answering with addresses, which Issue Mint accepts and verifies green. Cloudflare does it always, and Namecheap, Porkbun, DNSimple and Vercel offer it as a record type called ALIAS. Several do not offer it in any form: GoDaddy, 123 Reg, Hover and Gandi are the ones this comes up with most often, and a Route 53 alias only points at AWS resources, so it cannot cover this either. The provider guides say which case each one is in.

Is there an old record still sitting on the root?

Two records on the same host is the failure that looks most like nothing happening.

A domain bought recently usually arrives pointing its root at the registrar’s own holding page. If that row is still there beside yours, the resolver may answer with either, and yours reads as wrong or missing depending on which it picked. Delete the old row rather than editing around it. The same applies if the root previously pointed at a website you host somewhere else.

Did the whole hostname go into the host field?

Some providers add your domain to whatever you type, so example.com in the host field produces example.com.example.com.

For the root, most providers want @, and a few want the field left empty. The record row prints what it found underneath what it expected, and that line is the fastest diagnosis available: a value with your domain in it twice tells you which kind of field you are dealing with without any guessing.

Has www actually verified?

Issue Mint only offers the www address once www has verified, and that condition is worth applying to your own reading of the page.

Mid-propagation everything looks broken, and restructuring your address thirty seconds after adding the records is advice you would have to undo an hour later. Give it an hour. If www and the tracking record are green and the root is not, the diagnosis above holds. If nothing is green yet, this is not your problem and a record will not verify is the better page.

Taking the www address

One button in the domain tab, and your website is canonical on www.yourdomain.com from that moment.

It is reversible in one click, and the records for the root stay in the table and keep being checked, so moving to a provider that can do it later means switching back rather than starting again. Verification runs immediately after the switch rather than at the next sweep, so a domain sitting at not working goes green while you are looking at it. The bare domain or www covers everything the switch changes on your site.

What the www address does not change

Sending, click tracking and your subscribers are untouched by this choice.

The records that let issues come from your own address sit on the domain itself rather than on either host, so sending from your own domain works exactly the same. Tracking links run on go.yourdomain.com either way. Your list, your archive and your figures do not know the difference. One row of the HTTPS card will keep saying it is waiting, for the certificate on the bare domain, and that is expected on a www domain rather than a fault.

Still stuck

Write to us with the domain name and a screenshot of the root record as your provider shows it.

The useful thing in that screenshot is the record type. If your provider offers ALIAS, ANAME or CNAME flattening under a name we have not met, we would rather find that out and write it down than have you settle for the www address you did not want.