Ramifications of using Google Domains to making full use of the CDN?

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Hello all, I’m very confused about my particular situation - I’ve read over the following part of the docs about Naked Domains

You can use naked domains with Netlify, but we recommend you always use the www version of the domain (eg. www.example.com ) for your site. This makes it easier to take advantage of Netlify’s powerful CDN because the www option doesn’t require that your DNS provider use a certain type of record.
If you prefer the naked domain, we recommend you use a DNS provider with record types that work optimally on our CDN. All automatically generated DNS records in our Managed DNS will work. Or, you can use another provider that supports CNAME flattening, ANAME records, or ALIAS records for apex domains such as Cloudflare or NS1.
If you instead set an A record for the apex domain, you won’t be able to take advantage of the full Netlify CDN. If your provider lets you set an ALIAS, the full CDN will work. If not, when you serve from your apex domain with an A record, your assets (Javascript, CSS, images) may be served out of a global CDN depending on your deployment settings, but your HTML will be served out of our primary datacenter in the US.

I’ve registered my domain name with Google Domains, and it is indeed a naked domain (without the www), when I was adding it to my account to use for my website hosted on Netlify, the only configuration I did on the Google Domains side of thing was to switch my name servers over to the ones Netlify gave me to use during setup.

I want to make full use of Netlify’s CDN to serve my website, and nothing seems to be wrong with my setup but I just want to know if the above caveat applies to me, considering I have naked domain but I have not issued any special records on Google’s end? (Google doesn’t allow ALIAS, but they do allow CNAME records). If this indeed is affecting me, how can I fix this? I’m relatively new to the DNS world and I don’t fully understand how records work. Also, is it possible to transfer ownership of my domain name over to Netlify so I can manage it there only?

Thanks!

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Hi, @bvillagran. Welcome to our Netlify community site!

If you switched the name servers for the domain to the ones Netlify uses, then you are using our Managed DNS service.

The caveat above does not apply to domains using our Managed DNS service.

The caveat also does not apply if the third-party DNS service (anything besides Managed DNS) supports ALIAS/ANAME/CNAME records for the apex/bare domain.

From what I could find, Google doesn’t support CNAMEs on the apex/bare domain. Again, though, if you switched to the Managed DNS name servers this doesn’t apply.

Finally, regarding transferring a domain directly to Netlify, this isn’t possible. We are not an official domain registrar. We are a reseller using Name.com for the actual registrar. There is more about this here: