Move Your WordPress.com Domain to Cloudflare and Halve the Renewal

Cloudflare Registrar charges exactly what the registry charges them, with zero markup, and bundles WHOIS privacy for free. Retail registrars add a margin on top. For a .net the difference looks like this:

Two things trip people up:

You cannot renew a domain at a registrar where it is not registered. To get Cloudflare pricing you transfer the domain in. A gTLD transfer (.com, .net, .org) automatically adds one year, so it replaces the renewal rather than stacking on top of it.

Cloudflare will not let you transfer the registration until the domain is already running on Cloudflare DNS. So the real sequence is DNS first, registrar second, with any redirect rebuilt in the middle so the site never goes dark.

The full order of operations:

Step 1. In WordPress.com under Upgrades > Domains, open the domain, turn off Transfer lock, then start the transfer-out flow far enough to reveal the EPP / auth code. Copy it. Do not let WordPress walk you all the way through its own wizard, you only want the code.

Step 2. In the Cloudflare dashboard, Add a domain, choose the Free plan. Cloudflare scans existing DNS and assigns you two nameservers like name.ns.cloudflare.com. Note them.

Step 3. If the domain is a redirect (common when it just points at another site of yours), rebuild that redirect in Cloudflare now while it sits idle. See section 4.

Step 4. Back at WordPress.com, switch the nameservers from WordPress to the two Cloudflare nameservers.

Step 5. Cloudflare flips the zone to Active once it sees the nameserver change, usually under an hour. The transfer option stays greyed out until then.

Step 6. Once Active, go to Domain Registration > Transfer Domains, select the domain, paste the EPP code, and pay the at-cost fee. This payment includes the added year.

Step 7. Watch for the confirmation from the losing registrar. WordPress.com surfaces a Transfer Management page with an Accept Transfer button. Clicking it skips the 5-day wait and completes the transfer in minutes.

If your domain only exists to redirect to another site, the imported records (the host’s A records and a couple of CNAMEs) become redundant once you build a Cloudflare Redirect Rule. Tempting to delete them all for a tidy zone. Here is the trap:

The fix is to keep one proxied placeholder for the rule to attach to:

192.0.2.1 is a reserved TEST-NET address that never routes anywhere, which is exactly what you want: the proxy intercepts the request before that IP is ever used. Then a single Redirect Rule (Rules > Redirect Rules) handles the rest:

Keep the TXT verification record as DNS only. It does not need to resolve to anything, it just needs to exist.

Three things to settle once the registrar shows Cloudflare:

Auto-renew. Optional, but turning it on (Domain Registration > your domain) means you never repeat the two-days-from-expiry scramble. If you leave it off, set yourself a reminder a few weeks before the date.

DNSSEC. Worth enabling for the added integrity protection. Because Cloudflare is now both your DNS and your registrar, the DS record is published to the registry automatically, so it activates without you touching the registrar by hand. Give it from a few minutes up to a couple of hours to show as signed at the registry.

Registrar lock. On by default at Cloudflare, so that one is already handled.