DNS Propagation: Why Your New Domain Isn't Live Yet

You've pointed your domain at your new hosting, everything is configured correctly — and yet the site still won't load, or it loads for you but not for a colleague across town. Before you assume something is broken, take a breath: this is almost always DNS propagation, the normal delay while the internet catches up with your change. Here's what's actually happening, and how long it genuinely takes.

What DNS does in one sentence

DNS is the internet's address book: it translates your domain name into the numeric IP address of the server that hosts it. When you change hosts, or update a record, you're editing that address book entry — telling the world "this domain now lives here." The delay comes from how that update spreads.

Why the change isn't instant

To keep the internet fast, DNS answers are cached at many points along the way — your device, your router, and especially your internet provider's resolvers all remember the previous answer for a while so they don't have to look it up on every visit. How long they hold onto it is set by a value called the TTL (Time To Live), attached to each record and measured in seconds.

Until that cached copy expires, those resolvers keep handing out the old address, no matter how quickly you saved the new one. Propagation is simply the world's caches expiring, one by one, and picking up the new value.

How long it really takes

The honest answer is usually far less than the "up to 48 hours" you'll see quoted everywhere. That figure is a worst-case safety margin. In practice, with a normal TTL, most visitors see the new site within a couple of hours, and many within minutes. The 24–48 hour window mainly covers a few slow providers and rare edge cases — it's rarely what you actually experience.

Why it works for some people and not others

This is the part that feels like a glitch but isn't. During propagation, some resolvers have already expired their cache and point to the new server, while others are still serving the old one. So the site loads perfectly for a visitor on one network and not at all for someone on another — or it works on your phone's mobile data but not on your office Wi-Fi. That split is the expected midway state, not a broken configuration.

How to speed it up

You can't force the whole internet to refresh, but you can help:

• Lower the TTL before you migrate. If you know a move is coming, drop the record's TTL to 300 seconds a day ahead of time. When you make the switch, caches expire in five minutes instead of hours.
• Flush your own caches. Much of the "it's still not working for me" experience is local. Clear your browser cache, and flush your device's DNS cache, to rule yourself out first.
• Test on mobile data. A different network is the quickest way to see whether the new server is answering for anyone yet.

How to check where it stands

Instead of refreshing hopefully, use a global DNS-checker tool: enter your domain and it queries resolvers around the world at once, showing you a map of who is seeing the new address and who is still on the old one. As those turn over to the new value, you can watch propagation finish in real time.

When it isn't propagation at all

If a full day has passed and a global checker still shows the old address everywhere, it's no longer a waiting game — something is misconfigured. The usual causes are a record pointed at the wrong IP, an edit made at the wrong provider (many domains have DNS managed somewhere other than where they were registered), or two conflicting records. That's the point to send us your domain: we'll read your live DNS, tell you exactly which record is wrong, and point it where it should be.