What is DNS?
DNS is the process that your web requests take to get from your computer to the web-server, then back to your computer again. DNS is pretty complicated, but below is a very simplified version of it. You can see this article and this YouTube video for more information.
As you may know, IP addresses are what is used to allow different internet-connected devices to communicate with each other. While your computer does not understand what “google.com” is, it does understand what “142.250.190.46” is. In order for your website to connect to google, it first has to change “google.com” into “142.250.190.46”. This requires a series of servers, each of which may cache the result. The exact process is not important to this article, but you can check out this video to learn the DNS process and how it works.
So what is DNS propagation?
As mentioned above (And explained in the linked video), multiple external servers are used to turn “google.com” into “142.250.190.46”. Similarly, it takes multiple external servers to turn your website’s URL into the IP address of our server.
Additionally, since each external server will cache (store) the resulting IP address, these servers may be storing an older copy of the IP (Such as the IP address of your old hosting provider). Because of this, if you recently changed hosting providers, it can take some time before the DNS servers have the updated information to relay to your browser (Usually less then 72 hours).
TL;DR
In summary, DNS propagation is the time that it takes for DNS servers to update the IP address of your website. During this time, your website may be blank, or show the contents of your old web hosting provider. DNS is the way of the internet, and there is no way to change it or make it faster.
If you just skipped to this section and did not read the above, we highly recommend that you watch this short video to gain a better understanding of DNS.
