Using your own domain

You keep your address

Point your existing club domain at SwimWin and it stays your address. Families never learn a new URL, your printed flyers do not go stale, and your search results survive.

Until you do, your club is at yourclub.swim.win, which works perfectly well — and is how you read the finished site before you move your domain. It keeps working after you add your own domain, and it can never be removed.

Who can do it

Anyone at the club with the manage club permission — an owner or a club admin. It is in Website → Settings, under Your own domain. The website volunteer who edits pages cannot change it, on purpose: your club's address is also where everybody signs in.

Three steps

Add the domain. Type the address families will use — usually a subdomain like swim.yourclub.org. Nothing changes for anybody yet. A name with accents or another script (natation.école.fr) is fine: SwimWin shows it as you typed it and, underneath, the xn-- form DNS uses — the records are written with that form.
Add two records at your DNS host (wherever you bought the domain, or whoever runs your club's email). SwimWin shows you both, exactly as they must be written — copy them, do not retype them:
- a TXT record named _swimwin-challenge.swim.yourclub.org whose value starts swimwin-verify=. This proves the domain is yours.
- a CNAME record for swim.yourclub.org pointing at SwimWin. If your domain is a bare one like yourclub.org, most DNS hosts will not allow a CNAME there; use the A records SwimWin shows instead.
Wait, or press Verify. SwimWin checks every ten minutes. Verify now checks immediately and tells you which record it could not see yet. DNS changes can take an hour to appear.

When SwimWin sees the TXT record the domain shows Waiting for the pointing record; when it also sees the CNAME it goes Live — it serves your site and people can sign in on it. SwimWin then starts serving it and asks Let's Encrypt for its secure (https) certificate, which normally takes a few minutes; until it arrives the browser shows a certificate warning. SwimWin checks every ten minutes that your domain is serving a valid certificate for itself, and the domain says so once it is. If a day passes without one it shows Live, certificate missing — usually the pointing record was changed, or your DNS has a CAA record that does not allow Let's Encrypt. SwimWin keeps checking, and it clears on its own once fixed.

The record clubs forget

The TXT record. Clubs add the CNAME, see the site, and stop. Without the TXT record SwimWin cannot tell your domain from somebody else pointing theirs at us, so it will not go live. A domain nobody proves within seven days shows Not verified; add the record and press Verify and it still goes live. After seven days unproven, another club can claim the name — which is what stops somebody squatting on an address that is not theirs.

Make it primary

Once it is live, Make primary. Every email SwimWin sends your families — invitations, receipts, password resets — then links to your own domain instead of yourclub.swim.win.

The mobile app

The SwimWin mobile app does not use your web domain. If your club needs its own API address for the app, that is still set up by SwimWin support for now.

Removing a domain

Remove archives it; nothing is deleted. It stops serving your site and signing anybody in straight away, and within a few minutes SwimWin stops answering on it at all and its certificate is not renewed — so take the CNAME out of your DNS, or point it somewhere new, when you remove it. You cannot remove the primary domain; make another one primary first. Adding it again later starts a fresh verification.

For thirty days after you remove it, no other club on SwimWin can claim the address. Old DNS records, bookmarks and search results still send people to it for a while, and they should not land on somebody else's club. Your own club can add it back at any time.

What is not built yet

Automatic certificates for your own domain are built, and are being switched on in SwimWin's hosting now; no club domain has been through them yet. Until one has, a domain can be live here and still show a certificate warning in the browser — after a day it shows Live, certificate missing. If yours does, tell SwimWin support and they will finish it for you.