One of the very first steps to get started with your website is to choosing the perfect domain name. This can be a little tricky! You may have already decided on a domain for your site or you may still be brainstorming ideas. Great! You may just be completely lost and not sure of any domain names you should register. That's OK too! Our guide below offers a number of tips for choosing the perfect domain name.
You may want to read through these domain registration tips even if you think you have a domain name picked out already. After all, there may be some considerations that you haven't even thought of yet.
1. Consider A Shorter Domain Name
While there is room to be creative with your domain name, you may want to consider keeping your domain name short and concise. This makes it easier for you to share your domain name via word of month, makes it easier for your visitors to type it into their browsers and it just more simple to remember. While "SuperDuperFastWebHosting.com" may have been an appropriate domain name for our service, nobody wants to type that into their phone or computer. On the other hand, "a2hosting.com" is much easier to remember and type.
2. Protect Your Domain By Registering Its Other TLD Alternatives
Whether you have an existing domain name or you are registering a new one, you should consider protecting your domain by registering the other TLD options for your domain. For example, if you're registering a domain with a .com TLD, you should also consider registering the same domain but with other TLDs including .net, .io. .us, it, .tm etc. This will help protect your brand by ensuring competing companies or websites can't register your domain name because you already own many of the alternatives.
This will also prevent someone from scooping up the alternative TLDs to try to sell them to you at a higher price. Additionally, it could help you improve the usability of your site by ensuring your visitors can access your site if they do in fact type in a different TLD.
3. Consider Using A Creative Domain Hack
There are well over 300 million domains that have already been registered. Unfortunately there's a good chance that the domain you had your heart set on has already been registered. Don't worry though! There are creative methods for registering an eye-catching, memorable domain. This is especially true if the .com or .net version of the domain you had your heart set on have already been registered. Consider using a domain hack. Domain hacks build in the TLD into the domain name. Examples of domain hacks include CoolC.at, Gamb.it and and Foc.us.
4. Make Your Domain Name Your Memorable Brand Name
Search engines used to take into account the keywords in a domain name in their algorithm. They would give those sites preferential rankings based on those domain name keywords. That's no longer the case, particularly because spammers would take advantage of these loop holes. Spammers would register domains loaded with these keywords knowing that they would have to do minimal work to rank well for those keywords.
Since search engines no longer rank websites based on domain keywords, this gives you a better opportunity to use your brand name as your domain name. This allows you to register a domain that is easy for your audience to remember. It gives you ample chance to be unique.
A2 Hosting is a good example of this. One of our main focuses is to offer the industry's fastest domain hosting. Unfortunately, TheIndustrysFastestDomainHosting.com isn't the best domain name. It's long. It's hard to remember. It's not easy to type. It would've just been a terrible choice. However, since SEO doesn't take into account keywords in a domain name, we can use our short, memorable brand name as our domain; a2hosting.com. It's short, simple and to the point.
5. Register Common Domain Name Misspellings
You could follow all of these registration suggestions, like keeping your domain name simple and brand-able, but you could still end up with a domain that your visitors have trouble accessing. In this instance, users could have trouble spelling your domain. While this should definitely be a consideration before registering your domain, it would be prudent to register the misspelling alternatives for you domain to be safe. This would allow you to forward these alternative misspelled domains to your correct domain and not lose any traffic. Some of the most commonly misspelled words you may find in domains include "business", "jewelry" and "recommend"
6. Check The Legality Of Your Domain Name
It's not a bad idea to run your desired domain name through trademark and copyright databases to ensure that you are legally allowed to register the domain you're interested in using. You likely aren't intending to infringe on a copyright. However, you don't want a surprise "cease-and-desist" email from someone who owns the copyright for a term found in your domain name. Spending a few seconds searching for existing trademarks before you use them could save you a number of headaches in the future.
7. Check The History Of The Domain Before Registering It
There's a distinct possibility that the domain you want to register was previously owned by another website. When you have decided on the domain name you want to register, it's a good idea to search for that domain within the Wayback machine. The Wayback machine is a searchable archive of all websites. It allows you to see what the website for your desired domain name looked like in previous days, months and years.
With the Wayback machine, you can see if your domain name had some sort of website in the past. More importantly, this will allow you to see if the website had previously contained anything that was immoral, illegal or controversial. This is particularly important if you're launching a brand and don't want a harmful reputation before you even get started. You can also simply search for the domain name within a search engine to see if there are any mentions of it in forums, blogs or social media sites.
8. Avoid Hyphens (-) On Your Domain Name
You may be tempted to use a hyphen (or dash) in your domain name. This may be because the domain you really wanted has already been registered or because you think the hyphen breaks up the words in your domain nicely. It may also look creative. This won't be the case.
You should avoid using a hyphen in your domain name at just about any cost. A hyphen makes it much more difficult to share your domain name via word of mouth. It also makes it more difficult to remember your domain.
Let's use A2 Hosting as an example. Imagine if our domain name was actually a2-hosting.com. At first, it doesn't seem like it would be a big deal. However, we would continually have to explain to our visitors that our domain is "a2 dash hosting dot com". If new or returning visitors ever forgot to include the hyphen in the domain name, they would go to the wrong site. It's likely they would end up at a competing website. Not good!
Make everyone's lives easier. Just don't use a hyphen in your domain.
9. Set Your Domain To Auto-Renew
While you currently may be in the process of brainstorming what domain name you would like to use, take a moment to imagine your website in a year or two. You've built an attractive website, have an engaged audience and are continually having other sites link to you. You're thriving and only becoming more popular each day. Now imagine that you go on vacation, you forget to renew your domain while you are gone and your domain becomes inactive. In the worst case scenario, someone buys your domain name now that it is publicly available. After all, it became very valuable with all of the back links that you had spent time building.
This may seem like an unlikely scenario, but unfortunately this happens all the time. Domains are usually registered for a year. After this initial registration period, the domain needs to be renewed. If it isn't, the domain re-enters the general pool meaning anyone can now register it.
Don't let this happen to you. If you decide to register your domain with A2 Hosting (and we hope you do because you'll have an excellent experience), make sure to setup automatic renewal for your domain. When domain auto-renewal is turned on, we will send you a renewal invoice ten days before your domain's expiration date. This will provide you with ample time to finish the domain renewal process before the expiration date.
10. Check Availability Of Social Media Handles
Over half a million comments are posted on Facebook every hour. There are over 6000 tweets EVERY second. It's likely, especially as you're just starting to build your website, that you will get more visits and engagement to your social media than you will on your website. That's why it's crucial for you to check social media handles to make sure they are available for the domain name you want to register. If they are, you should register those handles just as fast as your register your domain name.
11. Select An Appropriate TLD
There are hundreds of TLD options for a reason. Each has a unique purpose. They are designed for specific website categories and for specific locations. While the .com TLD (commerce) and .net TLD (network) are two of the most popular options, there are plenty of other appropriate options to choose from. Consider registering these TLD options for your website:
- .biz - Intended for business websites
- .info - Designed for informational websites
- .org - Used by non-profit organizations and non-commercial entities
- .me - Often used for personal websites
- .blog - A popular TLD option among blogger
- .io - Often registered by startup companies
12. Act Fast! Buy Your Domain Before Someone Else Does!
It has happened to all of us. You're sitting at work or school and get an unbeatable idea for a website. Or you wake up late one night with a brainstorm for "the next big thing". Yes, you should definitely register your domain name before someone else does.
When should you be in even a larger rush to register your domain? When you spot massive trends or fads in society. Not only will you want to buy your domain before it's claimed by someone else, you want to start building your site fast before the trend passes.
13. Choose A Timeless Domain Name For Your Business
If you're going to buy a domain name for your business, you should consider the long term implications of the domain. Some considerations:
- Service expansion - You may expand the products and services you offer. You should consider using a broad TLD to advertise your service. For example, let's say you are a running coach, so you appropriately choose the .run TLD. If you think you may expand your specialties to be a biking coach one day, perhaps you should consider a .fitness TLD instead.
- gTLDs - If you choose a .us TLD as an indication that your business is located in the United States currently, what will happen if you decide to expand to other locations? You may not want to use a gTLD if you are a global company or expect to be one day. That way expanding to other locations will be much easier (of course you can employ a multiple ccTLD strategy based on the visitor's location).
Yes, you can always change your domain name to update it to better match your business as it expands. Yes, you can forward the old domain to the new domain. Yes, you can update your advertisements to match your new domain name. However, the bottom line is you can't update years of building your brand very easily. Doesn't it make sense to plan ahead with your domain registration?
14. Choose A Domain Name That Succinctly Explains What You Do
It takes just over 2.5 seconds to get a first impression of a website. If someone is confused by your website or don't quite know what the website specializes in, they're probably not going to spend very much time to investigate it. They're likely going to just close their web browser or just click the back button. This is a lost opportunity.
While keywords won't necessarily improve your search engine rankings, using a helpful keyword in your domain name can certainly help explain to your audience what you specialize in. If your visitors know what you do right off the bat, that should ultimately improve your bounce rate, conversion rate and time your visitors spend on your website.
15. Pay Attention To How The Domain Sounds When You Say It Out Loud
It's extremely easy to buy a domain name. You can also launch a website in a matter of minutes. Many users can do this all by themselves without a single human interaction. While your domain name may look OK when you read it in your head, that may not be the case when you say it out loud. How does it sound when you say it? Does the domain name roll easily off your tongue? Is it easy to pronounce? Does it sound controversial at all? Could it potentially be confused with other words unintentionally?
If you're buying an intentionally unique domain name by combining or condensing words, it may be more difficult than you thought it would be to pronounce.You may want to ask a friend or colleague to read the domain back to you before registering it. How does the domain name sound? Getting a second opinion from someone you trust can help you avoid an error. Remember! It's better to be safe than to be sorry!
16. Combine A Boring Single Word Description With An Exciting TLD
This domain name registration tip combines some of the previously mentioned tips. While not always the case, you want your visitors to have an idea of what you do or what sort of content you have simply by looking at your domain name. If you have a blog about "cars", having a domain name with the word "cars" in it makes a lot of sense. While not particularly eye catching or memorable by itself, you can combine the word "cars" with a fun TLD to make it exciting. Your "boring" cars domain name can easily become cars.ninja, cars.cool or cars.luxury. And just like that, you have an memorable and fun domain name.
17. Avoid Combining Words That Have The Same First and Last Letter
This rule may sound a bit confusing at first, but it is actually rather simple. If you have two separate words in your domain name and the first word ends with the same letter as the second word begins with, avoid that domain. This can cause typos and confusion when your audience tries to visit your site. It can also be difficult to read.
For example, you may want to combine the words "best" and "theater" in your domain name. When you combine these words in your domain, it becomes "besttheater.cool". The double "t", where the words are joined, is an issue can be cause. To avoid this, consider buying a domain that combines "top" and theater" instead. In this case, your domain name would be "toptheater.cool". This is a much more user-friendly domain name.
