How to Add a Subdomain in Cloudflare Easily 2026

After logging in, selecting a domain from your account drops you on its Overview screen, which shows unique visitors, total requests, and cache percentage over the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days, alongside a DNS panel on the right confirming your DNS Setup is Full. The left sidebar is where every other section lives — Records, AI Crawl Control, Investigate, Analytics, DNS, Email, SSL/TLS, Security, and more, all scoped to whichever domain is currently selected at the top of the page.

Clicking DNS in the left sidebar expands it into three sub-items: Records, Analytics, and Settings. Records is what you want for adding a subdomain — it's the actual list of every A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and TXT entry currently configured for the domain. The same page also surfaces an Active Subscriptions panel showing your current plan (Free, in a lot of small-site setups) and an API section with your Zone ID and Account ID, which matter if you're ever scripting DNS changes instead of using the dashboard.

On the DNS records page, the Add record button opens a modal titled simply "Add record," with a live description underneath that updates as you fill in the form — for example, "[name] points to [IPv4 address] and has its traffic proxied through Cloudflare." The Type dropdown lists every record kind Cloudflare supports: A, AAAA, CAA, CERT, CNAME, DNSKEY, DS, HTTPS, LOC, MX, NAPTR, NS, OPENPGPKEY, and PTR among them. For a subdomain, the two you'll actually use are A, if you're pointing straight at a server's IPv4 address, or CNAME, if you're aliasing to another domain or a third-party platform's URL.

With Type set to A, the form settles into its final shape: a Name field with placeholder text reminding you to "use @ for root" — meaning you only type the subdomain prefix, like blog or shop, not the whole domain — an IPv4 address field below it, a Proxy status toggle defaulting to on (the orange cloud, labeled Proxied), and a TTL field set to Auto. A collapsible Record Attributes section sits below for anything more advanced you don't need for a basic subdomain.

The Proxy status toggle is the one decision on this form worth pausing on. Orange cloud (Proxied) routes traffic through Cloudflare first, which enables caching, DDoS protection, and hides your origin server's real IP address.

Gray cloud (DNS only) just resolves the name to the IP directly, with none of Cloudflare's edge features in front of it — the right choice for records like a mail server that shouldn't be proxied. For a typical web-facing subdomain like blog or shop, leaving it proxied is the standard choice.

Clicking Save on the modal adds the new row to your DNS records table immediately, and Cloudflare's own edge network picks up the change right away since it's authoritative for the zone. Full propagation to every DNS resolver worldwide can still take a little longer in rare cases, so give it a few minutes before assuming something's wrong if the subdomain doesn't resolve on the very first try. Once it does, your new subdomain is live and, if proxied, already benefiting from Cloudflare's caching and security layer.