How to set up business email at your own domain

A business email is three things that have to be there at once: a domain you own, a mailbox (or a relay) that receives your mail, and the DNS records that tell the internet where to deliver it and which servers may send as you. Get one of the three wrong and the other two do not matter — the mail lands in a spam folder, or it never leaves.

This is the business email setup end to end: what the thing is, what the providers charge for it, whether you need one at all, and the records that make it work.

Can I create an email address for my business?

Yes, and the address worth having is you@yourdomain.com. The domain is the part that matters, and the part most providers hand you for nothing — a Gmail address is free in a minute and belongs to Google; an address at a domain you registered belongs to you, sits next to the site you publish, and survives the company you registered it with.

Two decisions come first: whether you want a mailbox or a relay, and who holds the domain. Everything after that is configuration.

What is a business email?

An address at a domain you own. The detail underneath is where two different products get confused, and the difference is the bill:

• A relay (forwarding) passes mail from you@yourdomain.com to an inbox

you already have. Nothing is stored on your domain, so it costs little, and it is the right answer when the address is a contact point.

• A mailbox is a real inbox on your domain — mail is stored, searchable,

and read on a phone. It is the right answer when the address is an identity: a person replies from it.

How to set up email forwarding without breaking deliverability takes the first one step by step, and Website hosting with email: a domain with free email, and what it costs puts the two prices side by side.

Does Wix offer business emails?

It does not — and the same is true of most of the market. Wix sells Google Workspace as a separate purchase, and so do Squarespace, GoDaddy, Shopify, Framer, Strikingly and WordPress.com. Two things in our research corpus are the exception, and the exceptions are worth knowing because they are rare.

Source: our own competitor corpus — the market table, prices verified 2026-09, and each vendor's own pricing page, captured 2026-10-17.

So the question has a flat answer: no, not included, and usually a separate purchase on a separate renewal. Here the shape is that forwarding comes with every domain, a real mailbox is a product line of its own, and the records that make the address work are published with the domain — so the name and the mail are set up in one place. The number is on the pricing page.

Is a Google business email free?

Not free, but often free for a year — and that year is usually the whole of what the reader is looking at. Google's own paid tiers carry the cost after it, and the vendors who bundle it say so plainly: Squarespace includes one Google Workspace account on Core and Advanced, free for the first year, and then at Google's standard annual or monthly rate; on Basic it is not included at all. Pagecloud bundles a year of Google Workspace with its annual plan and publishes the dollar value of the gift.

The trap is a free plan that is not a mailbox. A permanent free tier with a custom domain is a relay: it delivers your mail to an inbox you already have and stores nothing. Website hosting with email lists the free options, and most of them are relays.

Is Gmail considered a domain?

No. gmail.com is a domain, but it is not yours: you can write to it, you cannot move it, and the day you leave, the address goes with you. A business email is an address at your domain — and you can move it by pointing the domain at another provider. The address does not change, and neither does anything you have already sent.

How can I create an email address using my website domain?

Six steps, and the order matters: the records that say where mail goes have to exist before you test anything, and the record that says who may send as you has to be in place before the first message leaves.

1. **Register the domain, or point the one you have at the provider that will

hold the mailbox.** Everything else in this list happens at that provider.

1. Create the mailbox — the address itself, and the aliases you want

answered by it. A mailbox is one inbox with a name, not a bundle of plans.

1. Publish the MX records. MX is the one that matters most: it is the

list of servers allowed to deliver mail for your domain. Until it is right, mail to your address bounces.

1. Publish SPF. It lists the servers that may send as your domain. It is

the record that says "this server is allowed to speak for you".

1. Publish DKIM. It signs your outgoing mail so the receiver can check

that it came from you. This is the record that survives being relayed.

1. **Publish DMARC, then send a test message to somebody who does not know

you.** DMARC says what to do with a message that fails the other two. A colleague's inbox is a friendly filter; a stranger's is the one that counts.

The three records have jobs, and each answers a different question — Email deliverability: SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and what they actually prove takes them one at a time, and How DNS resolves a name, end to end explains why a correct record can still take a day to take effect.

Do I need a business email for my LLC?

No registry asks you for one. What asks for it is the other side of every transaction: the customer who wants to write to you, the supplier who wants to invoice you, the person who has to answer. A domain without an address at it is a name on a letterhead that goes nowhere.

The honest test is what the address is for. If it is where quotes, invoices and replies arrive, it needs to be a mailbox, and it needs to look like the business that sent it. If it is a contact point — a form address, a press address — a relay is enough, and the mail lands where you already read it.

An LLC is a legal form and the email is a commercial one. Nothing obliges you to have one, and most of the value of having one is that the address survives the provider you happened to register the domain with.

What website builders offer professional email domains?

Almost none of them, and the question is worth asking precisely because the answer is usually "extra". In our own research corpus, business email at the domain is delivered by two products; everywhere else it is a separate purchase, on a separate renewal, from a separate provider — which means a second bill, a second login, and a second place for a mistake to happen.

Where the bundle exists, it takes one of two shapes. The mailbox is included in the plan, or a third party's mail service is included for a year and then billed by that third party. Both are better than a separate purchase. Neither is the same as the domain and the mailbox sharing one account.

So the answer to the question — what website builders offer professional email domains — is: very few of them, and the ones that do usually hand you Google's rather than their own. If the address is going to be part of the business's identity, it is worth asking the provider who holds the domain what happens to the mail when you leave.