DNS Propagation: Why Your Website Takes 24 Hours to Update

When you update a DNS record, you expect it to work instantly. But often, it takes hours. This is mistakenly called "Propagation."

It's All About Caching

DNS doesn't "propagate" like a radio wave. Instead, thousands of DNS resolvers around the world have Old Data cached in their memory. They won't ask your server for the new data until their timer runs out.

Time To Live (TTL)

The TTL is the number of seconds a resolver is allowed to keep your record in its cache. If your TTL is 3600, it will take up to an hour for the change to be seen worldwide.

Check the global status of your records with our DNS Lookup Tool.