The best domain name is your business name

Your business name is the best domain name

Customers don't discover small businesses by typing keywords into an address bar. They hear the name — from a friend, a sign, an invoice — and search it. A domain that matches the name does one quiet, valuable thing: it confirms they found the right company, instantly, before a single word of the site loads. Resist the urge to be cleverer than your own name. If the exact match is taken, extend rather than mutate: add your city or your trade before you drop a vowel. A plumber whose name is taken does better adding the city to the end than inventing a spelling nobody will guess.

If you can't say it over the phone, it fails

The whole test costs nothing: say the address out loud to someone and watch what they type. Every rule below is that test in disguise.

• Short beats descriptive. A name that has to be repeated is a name that gets mistyped. Each extra word is another chance to lose the caller.
• Spellable on first hearing. If you find yourself spelling it letter by letter in conversation, your customers will be doing the same — without you there to correct them.
• No hyphens. Nobody says "dash" reliably, and nobody types it from memory. The unhyphenated version of your name is where those visitors actually land.
• No numbers. Spoken aloud, the listener can't tell the digit from the spelled-out word — so a share of your referrals lands somewhere else, permanently.
• No clever misspellings. You will spell-correct it in every conversation for the life of the business, and the correctly spelled version belongs to someone else — possibly a competitor quietly collecting your typo traffic.

The .com bias is about recognition, not ranking

Two honest facts that usually get blurred into one. First: search engines do not rank .com above other endings — a .co or a .studio can rank exactly as well, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Second: people default to .com anyway. It's what they type when guessing an address, what they assume when half-remembering one, and what they trust on sight in an inbox. That gap — no ranking penalty, real recognition cost — is the honest case for the standard advice. Take the .com when it's available. When it isn't: a local service business is usually better off adjusting the name-word than adopting an exotic ending, because its customers arrive by memory and word of mouth. A business reached mostly by clicking links — not typing — can carry an alternative ending at much lower cost.

Buy it in your own account — whatever it costs is cheap

$10–$25 a year buys the name; the account it sits in is what the money is actually for. Register the domain yourself, at any mainstream registrar, under an email address you control, with renewal billing on your own card. Not inside your web designer's account. Not bundled into an agency's "we handle all of that." The pattern that hurts is always the same: the business and the vendor part ways, and the vendor's account holds the domain — which means it holds the website and the email too, in effect if not in intent. Our domain-name guide covers this ownership rule in full; the one-line version is that whoever controls the registrar account controls the business's address.

The perfect name matters less than you think

Everything above is founding-week advice. An established business weighing a rename should almost always keep the domain it has. The switching costs are real and they are all paid by you: printed material, directory listings, other sites' links that took years to accumulate, and the customer habit of typing the old address — plus an awkward stretch where the old name and the new one both half-work. A slightly clumsy domain your customers already know beats a beautiful one they don't. If the site behind the name is the embarrassment, fix the site; the address is fine.

We don't sell domains — here's where we actually enter

Any registrar will sell you the name, and we earn nothing from whichever one you pick — so the advice above has no thumb on the scale. We build websites. The domain touches our work in exactly one place: the $249 hosted tier includes hosting, SSL, and the domain, live in 7 days. On every other tier, the name is yours to buy — and the ownership rule stands no matter who builds your site.

If the name is settled and the site behind it is the weak link, that's the part we fix: your existing content, recreated in clean vanilla code, from $49. We rebuild your site free first, using your real content and photos, as a working page you can edit and publish in one click. No card. Get the free preview →

Frequently asked questions