Why won't my .shop domain load sometimes?

Technical Q&A
5

Hey @NorisSasaran

I can see you are having an issue where sometimes your domain won’t load your Shopify store, but other times it does. That is certainly a frustrating issue, especially when it is sporadic and unpredictable.

I tried accessing your provided URL of www.myduckmate.shop and it appears to be working OK for me - it is loading your store and everything looks OK. I had a look at the DNS settings for this domain; the A Record looks correct, and the CNAME looks good too! It appears that you have done everything correctly so far.

However, upon checking the root domain of myduckmate.shop (notice the www sub-domain isn’t included) it appears the domain might have two different A Records present. One of those is the Shopify IP address of 23.227.38.65 which is fine, but the other one is 192.64.119.13 which is not Shopify related.

This A Record overlap will likely cause issues such as the one you are noticing now. If a browser/system sees multiple A records for a root domain it will randomly try to use one of them, so even though one of the A records is correct, some visitors may have trouble connecting to your website successfully.

I would recommend removing this other A record from the myduckmate.shop root domain. You will need to access your DNS settings for the domain and make sure you have a single A record pointing to 23.227.38.65. A lot of providers allow you to set the root domain A Record by using an [email removed] symbol in the host/name field. If you want any subdomains (including www) to work with Shopify then they need to be pointing to shops.myshopify.com.

Please note that any updates to DNS settings for a domain can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate across the internet. This is not something Shopify controls, it is simply how domains on the internet work.

If you are having difficulties with this, then sharing screenshots of the Settings > Domains section of your admin where this domain is located will be helpful. Also, a screenshot of the DNS settings in your third party host website would be beneficial here too!