My custom domain has been "pending" forever

Try this first

1. Give it time first. DNS changes spread across the internet on their own schedule — often minutes, sometimes hours, occasionally up to 48. "Pending" for two hours is normal, not broken.
2. At your domain registrar, compare the DNS records you created against the ones we asked for, character by character. The record type, the name (watch for "www" versus the bare domain), and the value all have to match exactly.
3. Look for old records pointing the same name somewhere else — leftovers from a previous website are a classic conflict. Remove or update them.
4. Once the records look right (or after a good long wait), run the verification again from your domain settings. A setup that's been going in circles can also be reset and started clean.

What's going on

A custom domain is a handshake between your registrar and us: you set records telling the internet your domain points to your archive, and once we can see them, we issue the security certificate that makes the address work in browsers. The certificate can only be issued after the DNS actually routes to us — so if the records are wrong, or the world just hasn't heard about them yet, everything downstream waits.

The honest truth about DNS is that the delay is real and outside anyone's control, including your registrar's. Same-day is typical; up to 48 hours is possible; nothing you or we do speeds it up.

If that didn't work

If it's been more than 48 hours and the records match exactly, something else is going on. Write to [email protected] with the domain name and where you registered it, and we'll look at what our verification is actually seeing.