Cannot set www subdomain as primary domain due to process completes

[jasperhilven]

Hi

For my website: https://massagearnauts.netlify.app/
I’am having trouble configuring the www subdomain as the primary domain.

my external DNS (Gandi) is configured as follows:
www CNAME 300 massagearnauts.netlify.app.
|massagearnauts.be / massagearnauts.be permanently forwards to www.massagearnauts.be

According to netlify I have the following config:
http://massagearnauts.be as Primary domain
http://www.massagearnauts.be Redirects automatically to primary domain

When I try to configure the http://www.massagearnauts.be/ as primary domain (as suggested online
on http://docs.netlify.com), I get the following error:
“We’re provisioning a certificate for your site, you cannot change custom domains until that process completes”
But this seem to never complete (stuck for already a week).

How can I break this lock?

[Melvin]

Hi @jasperhilven,

Thanks for reaching out and welcome to Netlify’s Support Forums!

I see you have the subdomain www.massagearnauts.be configured correctly for external DNS by having a CNAME Record point to massagearnauts.netlify.app. However, for the apex domain massagearnauts.be, the A Record is incorrectly pointing to 217.70.184.55 instead of 75.2.60.5:

host massagearnauts.be
massagearnauts.be has address 217.70.184.55
massagearnauts.be mail is handled by 50 fb.mail.gandi.net.
massagearnauts.be mail is handled by 10 spool.mail.gandi.net.

You’ll want to change the IP address to 75.2.60.5. You can follow option 1 of our Support Guide here:

[Support Guide] DNS Quick Start - How to set up DNS

Last reviewed: July 2025 Note: All options discussed in this guide assume you have already added your custom domain to your Netlify site. Hi there! Need to get your site up and running with DNS? Start here with either Newly purchased domain or Existing domain that you’ve already used. Newly purchased domain If you have a brand new domain purchased from a registrar such as Namecheap or GoDaddy, and you want to quickly get your DNS set up, you have two options: External DNS - Create these tw…

Once the SSL Certificate is provisioned, you’ll be able to select www.massagearnauts.be as the Primary domain by click on the Options button to the right of the subdomain and selecting Set as primary domain.

Let us know if you have any questions.

[jasperhilven]

Thank you very much Melvin, you analyzed and solved it perfectly, it is all working now

[SamO]

yaya @jasperhilven thanks for letting us know we were able to solve your problem. Have a nice day.

[francescofact]

Hello, I have the same problem and I cannot change the root domain to the CNAME. I have set correctly the CNAME of the “www” subdomain, but i cannot set it as primary because there is the certificate pending.

The site that manage my domain doesnt let me change the base domain, so i set a .htaccess rule that redirects to the www.

Is there a solution to have only the www subdomain in netlify?

[sid.m]

@francescofact What’s the name of your site?

[francescofact]

Thank you sid for the fast reply, but I just manage to solve this.
What I did is I have configured certbot on my machine with the acme dns plugin. I have requested a SSL certificate via certbot with DNS authentication. Once I had the certificates I set in netlify the custom certificate, so in this way i managed to set the “www” domain as primary, and then switch again on the automatic netlify certificate.

I hope this will help others in the future.