Module 8 · Go live
Your own domain
Stage 7, part two. your-firm.vercel.app works, but no client should ever see it. Let’s put the site on your firm’s own name — about $10–15 a year and, depending which route you take, either three minutes or fifteen.
Choosing the name
If you already own your firm’s domain, skip to the next section. If you’re buying one now, the advice for a law firm is narrower than the advice for a coffee shop:
- Your firm’s name beats keywords. Something in the shape of
smithfamilylaw.comreads like a practice.best-divorce-lawyer-denver.comreads like an ad, ages badly the moment you add a practice area or move counties, and starts an argument with your state’s advertising rules that you have no reason to start. - Match what you actually call yourself — the name on your letterhead, your bar listing and your engagement letters. Module 2 covered which names a firm may hold out to the public; the domain has to live inside the same constraint, and the compliance check in Module 6 looks at it.
- Short, spellable, sayable on the phone. You will read this aloud to people in distress. Avoid hyphens, avoid numbers, and say it out loud before you buy it.
- Take the
.com. For a professional practice it is still the ending people type and assume.
Option A — buy the domain inside Vercel (easiest)
The simplest path by a distance: buy the domain in the same place the site lives. Vercel connects it for you — no technical settings to copy anywhere. It costs a little more than the cheapest registrar; for most owners, the zero-hassle is worth the difference.
- In Vercel: open your project → Settings → Domains.
- Type the domain you want and, if it’s available to buy, click Buy.
- Pay. Vercel connects it to your site and switches on HTTPS — the padlock in the address bar — automatically. That’s the whole thing.
Since a live firm site is on the paid plan anyway, this is real money: paid accounts get one free domain for the first year. But only on endings like .online, .site, .space, .store, .tech and .website — not .com, and not during a free trial. For a law practice, pay the $10–15 and take the .com.
Option B — buy it elsewhere, then point it here (cheapest)
Buy from an outside registrar — a company that sells domain names — and connect it yourself. A few dollars cheaper, a few extra steps.
- Use a reputable one: Cloudflare, Namecheap, or Porkbun.
- Add it to the cart, decline every add-on, and check out. Glance at the renewal price while you’re there — $10–15 a year is normal; a $2 first year that renews at $60 is not a bargain.
- If privacy protection is offered free, keep it on. It hides your home address from the public registration record, which matters more in some practices than others.
- In Vercel: open your project → Settings → Domains → click Add Domain → type your domain.
- Vercel shows you the exact settings for your domain — usually one record for the plain name and one for the
wwwversion. It will suggest addingwwwas well; say yes. Vercel recommendswww.yourfirm.comas the main address and sends the plain version to it, so visitors reach you either way. - Log in at your registrar, find the DNS settings page — DNS is just the address book that tells the internet where your name points — and enter exactly what your Vercel screen shows: the Type, the Name and the Value for each record.
- Save. Back in Vercel the status turns Active, usually within minutes. The padlock is automatic.
Vercel tailors these values to your project and updates its recommendations over time, so the ones you need are whatever your own Settings → Domains page is showing right now. Never copy an address out of a video, an article, or a course. Type precisely what Vercel displays for your domain.
| Type | Name | Value |
|---|---|---|
| (the type Vercel names) | @ | (the value Vercel shows you) |
| (the type Vercel names) | www | (the value Vercel shows you) |
Registrar settings pages are genuinely confusing and none of them look alike. Take a screenshot and hand it over:
Ask Claude to read your DNS screen
I'm connecting my domain to Vercel. Here's a screenshot of my registrar's DNS settings page, and here are the records Vercel is asking me to add: [paste the exact records from your own Vercel Settings > Domains screen]. Please tell me exactly what to put in each box, one box at a time.
Domain changes take a few minutes to a couple of hours to spread across the internet. If it’s not working fifteen minutes in, give it an hour before you touch anything. Re-entering the settings while you wait is the classic way to turn a five-minute wait into a two-day problem.
One exact form of the name, used consistently, is worth more than most of the tactics in the next module: https://www.yourfirm.com on the Google profile, on every directory listing, in your email signature, on your card. Write it down the way you intend to use it forever. Module 9 builds on that consistency.
Type www.yourfirm.com into a phone and your site loads, with a padlock in the address bar. That is a real, secure, professional website for your practice — designed, written and launched by you, in a weekend, for about the cost of a bar association lunch. One module to go: making sure people find it.
Lost on the registrar’s screen even with the screenshot? Tell Claude which company you bought from — “I’m on Namecheap” — and it can give you the exact click path for that specific site.
The padlock is missing, or the browser warns about the connection. Almost always means the certificate hasn’t finished issuing yet. Wait an hour. If it persists, in Vercel remove the domain and add it again — that restarts the process cleanly.
The plain name works but www doesn’t, or the reverse. One of the two records didn’t save at the registrar. Open Vercel’s Domains page, compare both entries against your registrar line by line, and fix the one that differs.
More learning resources
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