How to access Google Workspace through your domain
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Here’s a thing that’ll blow your mind:
You can set up subdomains on your website to access all your most-used Google Workspace apps — think email, Drive and calendar.
What does this actually mean? Good question! Instead of accessing your email through the standard mail.google.com, you can create mail.yourdomain.com (“mail” being the subdomain).
Say what? Yep! You can set this up with just a few tweaks in your domain host settings.
Some of you might be wondering why this is even something you’d want to do. Well, how many of you have approximately one million email addresses that you access through Gmail? And their related Google Drives? (Only me? OK.)
If you are like me, you’ll know how frustrating it is to constantly have to switch been accounts. Even if you don’t actively sign out, you still need to toggle between them to access your apps, and they open new windows for each account — which is obviously mildly inconvenient 😉
Now if I want to check my business email, I can just type the address straight in (or at least the start of it thanks to auto-fill) and away we go!
Want to set this up for yourself?
How to set up Google Workspace on your domain:
1. Sign in to your Google Admin console connected to your Workspace.
That is, make sure you login with your custom email address, e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com.
2. Click on Account Settings:
3. Scroll down and click Custom URLs.
4. Enter a prefix for each URL.
Here is where you choose which apps you’d like to create your custom URLs for, and what the URLs will be. You can choose the Calendar, Drive and Docs, Gmail, Groups for Business and Sites apps. I only use the first three so I didn’t worry about Groups or Sites.
Enter the name / prefix for each in the blank field next to the apps you want to link. You can call them anything you like but it’s probably easiest to stick with the basics, like ‘mail’, 'calendar’ or ‘cal’, and ‘drive’. Click save when you’re done but don’t leave the page.
5. Now you’ll need to add CNAME records in your domain’s DNS records.
Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds!
Open a new tab and log in to your domain host, e.g. *Namecheap, Squarespace or GoDaddy.
I use Namecheap for mine and do this by clicking ‘Manage’ next to the domain I’m editing, then ‘Advanced DNS’.
Once you’re in your Advanced DNS settings, you’ll need to add a CNAME record for each custom URL you are creating. If you’re just doing this for your mail, create one record. If both mail and drive, two records, etc.
Find the section where you can add a new record. It will likely give you a drop-down menu to choose the record type. Select ‘CNAME record’ — it will give you one new record / line to complete at a time.
In the Host (or Name) field (it varies depending on your domain provider), enter the exact prefix you entered on your Google Admin custom URL field (e.g. mail, calendar, drive).
In the Target (or Value or Address) field, enter ghs.googlehosted.com.
You will need to repeat this process for each Google Workspace app you want to connect to your domain. If all apps, you will have five separate CNAME records.
An example of mine is below with the order of steps to for this section:
6. Return to your Google Admin console and click I’ve completed these steps.
Hey presto! This should be the end of the process. It may take some time for the records to register — if you test it out and it’s not yet working, try again in a couple of hours or the next day.
7. Set up your favourites!
Now your new URLs are set up you can take advantage of autofill after you’ve visited it the first time.
Eek, what have I done?!
Not quite working how you think it should? Head over to Google and check out their troubleshooting tips.
What do you think? Is this something you’d like to give a go?
