Most people own a website the way they own a car with the bonnet welded shut. It works, somebody else looks after it, and the first time something goes wrong the vocabulary alone is enough to make you hand over a credit card to whoever is nearest. This post opens the bonnet. By the end you will know what a registrar, DNS, a nameserver and a host each do, why we build sites the way we do, and what the speed scores people quote actually measure. None of it is hard; it has just never been explained to you in order.
The four things that make a website exist
A website is four separate things that most people think of as one. Each is bought, controlled and moved independently, and most confusion comes from mixing them up.
The domain name is the address: yourname.com. You rent it, by the year, from a registrar.
DNS is the phone book that turns that address into instructions: where the website lives, where email for that domain should go, and a few other records. Nameservers are the computers that hold that phone book and answer when a browser asks.
Hosting is the computer that actually holds your site's files and sends them to anyone who asks.
The site itself is the files: the pages, the images, the hidden layer of structured data. This is the only one of the four that is really yours in a creative sense, and it is the one most platforms will not let you take with you.
The registrar: where you rent the name
A registrar is a company accredited to sell domain names: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google's old registrar now run by Squarespace, Cloudflare's own, and hundreds of others. When you buy yourname.com you are renting it for a term, usually one to ten years, and the registrar records that you are the holder. Two things to understand about this.
First, the registrar does not have to host your site, run your DNS or do anything else. It can, and it will try to sell you all of it, but the only thing a registrar must do is hold your registration. Everything else can live elsewhere.
Second, the registration is the thing that matters. Whoever is listed as the holder owns the name. Keep it in your own name, in your own account, with your own card on file, and renew it. The commonest personal site disaster is not a hack; it is a domain that lapsed because it was registered by a designer who moved on. We never register domains on a client's behalf for that reason.
DNS and nameservers: the phone book and who holds it
When someone types yourname.com, their browser needs to know which computer to ask for the site. It asks the domain's nameservers, which reply with the DNS records: an A or CNAME record for the website, MX records for email, TXT records for things like proving ownership to Google. The nameservers are set at the registrar, and they can point anywhere.
By default they point at the registrar's own DNS. You can change them in a form, usually in five minutes, to point at a different DNS provider. This is what "moving nameservers to Cloudflare" means: the domain stays registered where it is, you still pay the registrar, but the phone book is now held by Cloudflare, which answers DNS queries from hundreds of locations worldwide and gives you the tools we need for a personal record. That change does not move the registration, does not change who owns the name, and can be reversed by changing the form back.
Why we prefer it: with the DNS at Cloudflare we can host the site at the bare domain (yourname.com rather than www.yourname.com), make www and any alternate domains redirect to it, set up email routing for a [email protected] address without buying a mail service, and add the record Search Console asks for in seconds. Without it, the site has to live at www and most of those conveniences disappear.
Hosting: the computer that serves the files
A host stores the files and sends them when a browser asks. The traditional kind is a server somewhere, running software that assembles each page on request from a database. The modern kind for a site like yours is a network of servers around the world that each hold a copy of the finished pages and hand them over without assembling anything. Cloudflare Pages, which we use, is the second kind. Your site is copied to Cloudflare's network, which the company says spans more than three hundred cities, and whoever opens it gets it from the nearest one. There is no server of yours to maintain, patch or pay for, and the hosting for a small site costs nothing.
Why pure, and not a builder
A site builder (Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy's builder) or a content system (WordPress) gives you an editor and a theme, and in exchange it sits between you and the page. Every page carries the platform's scripts, styles and markup along with your words. For a brochure that is a fair trade. For a personal record it causes three problems.
Weight. Platform pages load the platform first and your content second. Builders have improved sharply, and the numbers below show it, but a hand built page has nothing to load except itself.
Control of the hidden layer. The structured data Google and the assistants read is generated by the platform's templates, in the platform's shape, often describing you twice or describing the platform instead. Fixing it means fighting the template. On a hand built page every line of it is written on purpose. The web's secret graph explains why that layer decides what the machines say about you.
Ownership. Platform sites live on the platform. Export is partial at best, and the structured data does not export at all. A pure site is a folder of files that any host on earth can serve. If we vanished tomorrow, your site would keep working and anyone could take it over.
What the speed scores mean
You will see two kinds of number quoted. Lighthouse is a lab test, run by Google's tools on a simulated phone and connection; it produces a performance score out of 100 and is useful for diagnosing a page, less useful for comparing sites, because the lab is not the world. Core Web Vitals are field data: measurements collected from real visitors in Chrome, reported as the experience of the slower quarter of them (the 75th percentile). Google uses the field data in ranking. The three vitals that matter are Largest Contentful Paint, how long until the main content shows, with 2.5 seconds as the pass line; Interaction to Next Paint, how quickly the page responds to a tap; and Cumulative Layout Shift, whether things jump around while loading. A fourth, Time to First Byte, measures how long the server takes to start responding and is where traditional hosting shows its cost.
Independent field data from the State of Web Vitals report for 2026, across roughly 95,000 to 190,000 sites, gives the shape by platform:
| Platform | Pass loading test (LCP) on phones | Server response (TTFB) pass, desktop | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | about 94% | about 72% | Much improved; still carries its scripts |
| Squarespace | about 86% | about 98% | Fast servers, heavier pages |
| WordPress | about 70% | about 36%, median response 1.7 seconds | Assembles each page on request; depends on hosting and plugins |
| A pure site on a global network | Passes by design | Passes by design | Nothing to assemble, served from the nearest city |
Separate HTTP Archive analysis puts the share of WordPress sites passing all Core Web Vitals on mobile at under half. A well kept WordPress site with good hosting passes; most are not well kept. The last row has no survey number because there is nothing to survey: a finished page sent from a nearby server with no scripts is the thing the tests are designed to reward. We can show you the scores for your own site on launch day, and they will be the kind that does not need explaining.
What this means for a personal record
Speed is a ranking signal, but the larger point is that a fast, light, hand built page is also the easiest page for the machines to read. No scripts to execute before the content appears, no template noise around the structured data, no platform describing itself in your schema. The qualities that make a site score well are the same qualities that make it citable, which is why we treat them as one job rather than two.
What you own, and what you can take with you
| Thing | Who owns it | Where it lives | Can you take it elsewhere? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The domain name | You | Your registrar account | Yes, by transfer; it was never anywhere else |
| The DNS | You, managed by us | Cloudflare, under nameservers you can change | Yes, change the nameservers at the registrar |
| The hosting | Cloudflare, free tier | Cloudflare's network | Yes, the files run on any host |
| The site files | You | Delivered to you, plus hosted copy | Yes, they are plain files |
| The structured data | You | Inside the site files | Yes, it travels with the files |
Nothing in that table is locked. That is on purpose, and it is the difference between a record you own and a page you rent.
A glossary, in one place
Domain: your address. Registrar: where you rent it. DNS: the records that say where things for that address live. Nameservers: the computers that hold those records, set at the registrar, movable. Host: the computer or network that serves your files. Static site: pages that are finished before anyone asks for them. CMS or builder: a platform that assembles pages on request from an editor. Lighthouse: Google's lab speed test, scored out of 100. Core Web Vitals: real visitor measurements Google uses in ranking. CDN: a network of servers that each hold a copy of your site; Cloudflare is one.
What we do on setup, in order
- Confirm you own the domain. In your name, in your account. If you do not have one, you buy it; we help choose, we do not hold it.
- Move the nameservers to Cloudflare. A form at your registrar, five minutes, reversible. Registration stays where it is.
- Build the site pure. Pages, images, the hidden layer, nothing else. Validated before anything goes live.
- Deploy to Cloudflare's network. Your domain and www pointed at it, www redirected to the bare domain, email routing if you want an address on the domain.
- Verify in Search Console and request indexing. The DNS record takes a minute because the DNS is already at Cloudflare. What to watch there.
- Hand you the files. A copy of everything, with instructions. You could host it anywhere tomorrow.