How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Startup

Your domain name is the one part of your website that is painful to change. The design can be refreshed, the pages rewritten and the hosting moved, but the address goes on your business cards, your email signature, your invoices, your social profiles and every link anyone ever gives you. It is worth an hour of proper thought before you buy one in a hurry.

What Makes a Good Domain Name

• Short. Fewer characters means fewer typos, and it fits on a business card and in a social handle.
• Easy to spell. If people have to guess, some of them will guess wrong and end up somewhere else.
• It passes the say-it-out-loud test. Say it to someone over the phone or across a noisy room. If you have to spell it or explain it, keep looking.
• It matches the business name. Customers who know the name will type it. A domain that differs from the name is a permanent source of confusion.
• No hyphens or numbers. Nobody remembers whether it was "two" or "2", and hyphens are forgotten entirely.
• No deliberate misspellings. Dropping a vowel to get the name you wanted means explaining the spelling for the life of the business.

If you are still choosing the business name itself, run the domain and the name together. A great name with no usable domain is a compromise from day one.

.co.uk, .com or Something Else?

The extension says something about who you are and who you serve, and the right choice depends on your customers rather than on fashion.

For most of the startups and small businesses we build websites for, the answer is a .co.uk as the main domain with the .com registered as well if it is free, both pointing at the same website. A software product selling to the world is usually better on a .com from the start.

Checking the Name Is Available

Any registrar will tell you whether a domain is free in seconds. The more useful check is what happens when it is not, which is the common case for short names.

• See whether the domain is in use. Visit it. A working business means the name is taken in every sense that matters. A parked page or an expired-looking site may mean the owner would sell.
• Try a qualifier. Adding what you do or where you are, such as a trade, a service or a town, often frees up a sensible domain and can help customers understand what you do.
• Consider a premium domain carefully. Names that are already owned and listed for sale can run to hundreds or thousands of pounds. That can be worth it for a brand you are committed to, but not for a name you chose last week.
• Stay away from near copies. A name one letter away from an existing business in your field invites confusion, lost customers and possibly a legal letter.

Legal Checks Before You Commit

A domain being available does not mean the name is yours to use, and the checks take ten minutes.

• Companies House. Check whether a company with the same or a very similar name already exists. Registering a company name gives you the name as a company, but it is not a trade mark and does not stop someone else trading under it.
• The UK trade mark register. Search the Intellectual Property Office register for the name and close variations in your area of business. If someone holds a trade mark for it, choose a different name, however good the domain is.
• Consider registering a trade mark yourself. The official fee for a UK application is in the low hundreds of pounds for one class of goods or services, with a smaller fee for each additional class, before any professional help. It is the only thing that genuinely protects the name.
• Social handles. Check that a matching handle is free on the networks you will use, and register them at the same time as the domain even if you will not post for months.

Buying the Domain

How you buy the domain matters as much as which one you buy, because the registration record is what proves you own it.

• Use a reputable registrar with a clear control panel, sensible renewal prices and support you can reach. Introductory offers are fine, but check what the renewal costs.
• Register it in your own account, in your name or the company's name, with your own email address as the contact. If a designer, an agency or a friend registers it for you, they own it, whatever the arrangement feels like. Our guide to questions to ask a website designer includes the ownership questions to settle before any project starts.
• Switch auto-renew on and keep a payment card up to date. An expired domain can be bought by anyone, and getting it back is expensive or impossible.
• Ask about privacy options if you are registering as an individual, so that your home address is not published in the public record.

If you have registered variants, such as the .com alongside the .co.uk or a common misspelling, you do not need separate websites for them. They simply redirect to the main domain.

After You Have Bought It

Business email

Set up email on the domain straight away, before the website exists. An address on your own domain looks far more credible than a free webmail address. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both provide it for a few pounds per user per month, and either can be set up in an afternoon.

DNS, in one paragraph

DNS is the address book that tells the internet where your website and your email live. Your designer, host or email provider will give you a handful of records to add in the registrar's control panel: typically one or two records that point the website at the hosting and a set that point the email at your email provider. Changes take a few hours to spread.

Connecting it to hosting

Once the website is built, the domain is pointed at wherever it is hosted, and a security certificate is issued so the site runs on https. Our guide to website hosting for startups explains the options and what they cost. If we are building your website, we handle the connection and the certificate as part of the launch, and our managed cloud hosting keeps it running afterwards.

Put the domain to work early

A coming soon page on the domain, with your name and a way to sign up, means the address is live and collecting interest from the day you buy it rather than sitting empty while the full website is designed.

Mistakes That Are Painful to Fix

• Changing the domain after launch. Every page of the old domain has to redirect to its equivalent on the new one to keep your Google rankings, every listing and profile has to be updated, and everything printed is wrong. It is a project in its own right. Our website redesign guide explains how redirects protect rankings when it cannot be avoided.
• Registering through someone else's account. When the relationship ends, the domain goes with it. We see this most often with a previous designer or a former business partner.
• Letting it expire. A missed renewal email and an out-of-date card are all it takes. Domain squatters watch for expiring names and the price to recover one is rarely reasonable.
• Choosing a name you cannot trade mark. Descriptive names and names close to existing brands are hard or impossible to protect, which means anyone can trade under something similar.

Get the domain right and nobody will ever notice, which is exactly the point. Once you have it, our startup website checklist covers everything else your first website needs, and if you are ready to talk about the website itself, you can see how we approach startup web design or simply contact us with the name you have chosen.