Short answer: Log in to GoDaddy → My Products → find your domain → click the three-dot menu → Manage DNS → Add New Record → choose CNAME → fill in Name (the subdomain, e.g. email) and Value (the target hostname, e.g. u1234567.mta.acme.io) → set TTL to 1 hour → click Save.

That's the whole path. The rest of this post is about why it sometimes looks like it worked when it didn't, and what to do when DNS takes longer than you expected.

Where GoDaddy hides the DNS manager

GoDaddy calls the DNS panel DNS Management, and it's behind two menus. People hunting for a CNAME tend to get stuck at one of three wrong turns:

They click Domain Settings from the domain's overview page. That's domain registration stuff — contacts, transfer locks. No DNS.
They click Manage next to the domain. That's domain-level controls — forwarding, nameservers. Still not where records live.
They click Website on the navbar. That's GoDaddy's website-builder products. Entirely different tree.

The right path is through the account menu, not the domain's overview:

After logging in, click your name (top-right) → My Products.
Scroll to the Domains section.
Find the domain you want to edit. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) next to it.
Choose Manage DNS.

You're now on the DNS Management page, which lists every record on the domain (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV, CAA, NS, SOA). This is where CNAMEs live.

Adding the CNAME

On the DNS Management page:

Click Add New Record (or + ADD in older GoDaddy skins — same button).
In the Type dropdown, choose CNAME.
Three fields appear:
- Name — this is the subdomain part only. If you want email.yoursite.com to be the CNAME, put email here. If your DNS provider told you to create the CNAME at the root (the apex — yoursite.com itself), GoDaddy doesn't support that for CNAMEs and you'll need to use an ALIAS or Forwarding instead — more on that below.
- Value — the target hostname your DNS instructions gave you, e.g. u1234567.mta.acme.io or cname.vendor.io. Paste it without http:// or https://. No trailing slash. No path. Hostname only. GoDaddy will silently reject anything that isn't a valid hostname and sometimes won't tell you it did.
- TTL — set this to 1 Hour. GoDaddy's default is sometimes 1 day; that's fine for stable records, but it means your first fix-up if anything is wrong will take 24 hours to propagate. 1 hour during setup, bump back to 1 day once you've verified it works.
Click Save.

GoDaddy will usually show the record in the list within 5–10 seconds. If you don't see it, refresh the page; the UI occasionally drops the optimistic update.

Why your CNAME might look added but not resolve

This is 80% of why people search for help on this topic. The record is in GoDaddy's UI. The vendor's verification check says "CNAME not found." Three reasons, in order of frequency:

1. DNS propagation — you're just early.

DNS doesn't update instantly. GoDaddy's authoritative nameservers publish the record within seconds, but your local DNS resolver (your ISP, your office router, 1.1.1.1) has probably cached the absence of that record from when you last checked. That cache has a TTL of its own — often 30 minutes to 24 hours.

To check whether GoDaddy itself is serving the record, use a DNS tool that bypasses your local cache:

dig +short CNAME email.yoursite.com @8.8.8.8
dig +short CNAME email.yoursite.com @1.1.1.1

If those return the target hostname, your record is live. You're just waiting for propagation to reach your checker. Give it an hour.

2. You pasted the full hostname into Name, or only the subdomain into Value.

This one catches people fast. If you put email.yoursite.com in the Name field, GoDaddy interprets that as email.yoursite.com.yoursite.com. And if you put only the short version of your vendor's target (u1234567.mta instead of u1234567.mta.acme.io) in Value, the CNAME points nowhere.

Fix: Name is the subdomain part only. Value is the full, final hostname the vendor gave you. If in doubt, copy-paste from the vendor's instructions without editing.

3. You already have another record at the same name.

DNS has a rule: a CNAME can't coexist with any other record at the same name. If you already have an A, MX, or TXT record at email.yoursite.com, adding a CNAME there is invalid. GoDaddy usually catches this and shows an error, but sometimes saves the CNAME anyway in a broken state.

Fix: check the DNS Management list for any pre-existing records at the same name. Either delete them, or put the CNAME on a different subdomain.

The apex CNAME problem (and GoDaddy's workaround)

If your vendor told you to create a CNAME at the root of your domain — meaning yoursite.com itself, not a subdomain — GoDaddy won't let you. Neither will most registrars. It's a DNS spec limit: a CNAME at the apex conflicts with the SOA and NS records that must exist there.

GoDaddy's workaround is called ALIAS / ANAME / Forwarding, depending on which version of the UI you're looking at. It's not a true CNAME but it behaves like one for most purposes — GoDaddy resolves the target and serves back the resulting A record.

If your vendor supports it, you can also point the apex using an A record to the resolved IP. The downside: if the vendor changes their hosting IPs, you won't automatically follow; a CNAME / ALIAS does. Most modern vendors provide both options in their instructions — use whichever matches the apex box.

How long should you wait before declaring it broken?

GoDaddy's authoritative nameservers update in seconds. Public recursive resolvers (Google's 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1) typically see the new record within 5–15 minutes. Your home/office resolver and your vendor's verification endpoint might take longer — 30 minutes to an hour is common, occasionally 24 hours.

Rule of thumb:

< 15 min since saving: just wait. Don't delete and re-add; that resets nothing useful and sometimes causes the vendor's check to flag the domain.
15–60 min: verify with dig @8.8.8.8 as above to confirm GoDaddy is serving it. If yes, the problem is downstream caching — wait longer.
60 min and dig @8.8.8.8 still shows nothing: one of the three mistakes above. Re-check Name, Value, and collision with other records.

Why your users shouldn't have to read this

If you're a SaaS founder reading this because your users are bouncing off the CNAME step of your setup — you're in the right place. The three mistakes above happen to people who've added DNS records dozens of times; they happen every day to users who haven't.

We built Inboard for this. Your user signs up, declares the record in your dashboard's widget, gets walked through their specific registrar's DNS panel with the right field names pre-filled, and we poll DNS in the background until the record resolves. Green tick when it's live; automatic re-check every 30 minutes while they wait. If you ship a tool that asks users for a CNAME at install — on GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Route 53, and every registrar that isn't — this is the page for you.

If you're the user who came here to add a CNAME on GoDaddy — you've got what you need above. Good luck.