How Not to Choose a Domain Name

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

The domain decision still shapes everything else

Picking a domain name feels like a five-minute job, so it's tempting to rush it and get on with the "real" work of building the site. That's still the biggest mistake we see. Your domain is the anchor for your brand, your email addresses, your SEO and every piece of marketing you'll ever produce. Treat it as an afterthought and you'll be living with the consequences for years.

Mistakes that still catch businesses out

• Not thinking ahead. If you bake a town, city or region into your domain, make sure it's one you'll still be happy with once the business grows. A domain like norwichplumbing.co.uk works fine until you start covering the whole of East Anglia.
• Settling for "will do". A domain that's close enough but not quite right rarely feels like a bargain a year later. If the name you actually want is available, it's usually worth paying more for it.
• Assuming a taken name is off the table. Domains change hands constantly on the aftermarket, through marketplaces such as Sedo or registrar auction sites. A polite enquiry to the current owner is often cheaper than you'd expect.
• Ignoring trademarks. Registering a domain that infringes someone else's trademark can end in a formal dispute process or a solicitor's letter, and you can lose the domain along with the money you spent on it. Check the trademark register before you buy.
• Only having one idea. Build a shortlist of ten names, not two, before you start checking availability. Otherwise you'll end up compromising in a hurry the moment your favourites turn out to be gone.
• Inventing spellings to get round a taken name. If carsforyou.com is gone, cars4yoo.com isn't a real substitute. Nobody remembers the substitution, and you'll spend years correcting people or losing them to a competitor with the sensible spelling.
• Not saying it out loud. Read the whole domain aloud, without spaces, before you buy it. What looks fine written down can read as something else entirely once the words run together, and can carry an unfortunate meaning in another language if you trade internationally.

What's changed since this advice was first written

A few things are worth updating for anyone choosing a domain now:

• The pool of extensions has grown enormously. Alongside.co.uk and.com there are options such as.shop,.store and.uk, which can be useful if your ideal name is taken on the traditional extensions. They're not automatically second-rate, but weigh up how recognisable they'll be to your customers before you commit.
• WHOIS privacy is now standard rather than optional. Since GDPR came into force in 2018, most registrars redact your personal details from public WHOIS lookups by default, so paying extra for privacy protection is largely unnecessary.
• Exact-match domains carry far less SEO weight than they did in 2014. Search engines are much better at understanding what a brand does regardless of what's in the domain string, so don't chase an exact-match name at the expense of one that actually represents your brand well.
• Buy the obvious typo and misspelling variants of your chosen domain and redirect them to your main site. It's cheap insurance against lost traffic and, in the worst cases, deliberate impersonation.

A few famous cautionary tales

Some domain name mistakes become legendary precisely because nobody spotted the problem until it was too late. These examples have been doing the rounds for years as a lesson in reading a domain out loud, without spaces, before you register it:

• whorepresents.com, a database of talent representatives.
• penisland.net, a pen retailer.
• expertsexchange.com, a knowledge-sharing site for professionals, which later added a hyphen to become Experts-Exchange for exactly this reason.
• itscrap.com, an IT recycling and disposal business.

None of these were badly named on paper. Read the words apart and each one makes perfect sense. Read them as a single unbroken string, which is how a domain actually appears in a browser bar, and the problem is obvious. It's a two-minute check that costs nothing, and it's still skipped surprisingly often.

None of this is complicated, but that's exactly why it gets overlooked. Take an afternoon, write a proper shortlist, check trademarks and pronunciation before you buy, and pick the name you'd be proud to print on a van rather than the one that happened to still be available.