Now that you have the background knowledge you need, we can take a closer look at what DNS propagation is and how you can influence its performance.
When you make a change to your website’s DNS, the changes you make such as pointing your site to a new hosting service, don’t happen instantaneously. The update (propagation) can take varying amounts of time to complete. This is called DNS propagation.
There is no set time for DNS propagation to complete, as there are too many variables relating to many aspects of how your site is constructed and hosted. A good example is TTL or Time To Live. TTL has a fundamental impact on the performance of your website. The TTL value associated with a DNS record will have a profound effect on the speed of DNS propagation.
How Long Does DNS Propagation Take?
By default, most TTL for your DNS records will be set at a time interval of between 1 to 4 hours. For example, when you point your domain at ZPEnterprises.co, you have the option to set the TTL.
ZPenterprises recommends setting the TTL of your website to 1 hour, which also happens to be the time set by default. This will ensure your website’s load time is as low as possible.
Nameservers can also have an impact on TTL values, and therefore, the load time of your website.
How Do I Know If My DNS Is Propagating?
As the Web is hosted across a massive network of servers that make up the Internet, your website’s DNS records could be cached on many servers. It’s important to remember that propagation will only be complete when all these cached DNS files have been updated.
This is why in some cases, DNS propagation can take anything from a few hours to several days. Bear this in mind when making changes to your DNS file that might be time-sensitive and impact the performance of your website.
If you want to check if DNS propagation has changed, there’s a handy tool whatsmydns.net you can use.
Pointing Your Domain to Kinsta
One of the practical uses of your website’s DNS file is if you want to change hosting services. For example, if you wish Kinsta to handle your WordPress hosting, you have a couple of options when pointing your domain at Kinsta:
Your first option is to use the A record of your DNS.
