Choosing an Ideal Domain Name: Some Rules to Follow

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

Choosing a domain name still feels like a big decision, because it is one. It's often the first thing a customer sees, it sits on every invoice and van livery you ever print, and changing it later is disruptive and expensive. The good news is that most of the advice below still holds up. A few things have changed since this article first ran, and it's worth being clear about what and why.

The rules that still work

Whether you're setting up a new store or reviewing an existing one, these fundamentals haven't dated:

• Keep it short. A long domain is harder to remember, harder to say out loud, and more likely to be mistyped. If your first idea reads like a sentence, shorten it.
• Make it easy to type. Avoid clever abbreviations like "cars4u2day.com" and avoid invented spellings. Both increase the chance someone lands on the wrong site, possibly a competitor's.
• Avoid numbers. A number can be read as a digit or a word, and that ambiguity doesn't exist when someone hears the name spoken. Skip numbers where you can.
• Make it memorable, not corny. There's a line between catchy and cringeworthy. Aim for something people repeat correctly to a friend, not something that makes them wince.
• Buy the obvious variants. Common misspellings and near-identical domains are still cheap to register and worth owning defensively, so a copycat or a lazy typist doesn't end up on someone else's site instead of yours.
• Don't be offensive or ambiguous. A "clever" domain that reads badly when run together as one word, or that could be misread as something crude, will cost you more custom than it wins.

What's changed: keywords in domains

The original advice was to pack your domain with keywords, on the basis that "londonautorepairs.com" would outrank "jimfixesit.com". That was reasonable thinking in 2014, but Google's algorithm had already started moving against it, and the shift has continued since. Having your exact search term in the domain no longer gives you a ranking advantage on its own, and domains that look keyword-stuffed can actually look spammy to both users and search engines.

The advice now is simpler: choose a name that's genuinely clear about what you do or reflects your brand, but don't force keywords in purely for SEO. If a descriptive name also happens to be a strong brand name, that's a bonus, not a requirement. Your on-page content, structured data and site authority do far more for rankings than the domain string ever will.

Thinking local, and choosing an extension

Location-specific domains still make sense for genuinely local businesses. "salemglasscleaners.com" tells a visitor exactly where you operate, and that clarity still helps conversion even if it no longer moves the SEO needle directly.

Extension choice has more options than it did in 2014. A quick comparison of what's commonly used by UK businesses now:

If you can secure both the.co.uk and.com versions of your name, register both and point one at the other. It's cheap insurance and stops a competitor or a scammer picking up the other version.

Privacy is largely sorted for you now

Domain registration once required weighing up whether to pay extra for WHOIS privacy, so your name, address and phone number weren't published publicly against your domain. Since the GDPR came into force in 2018, UK and EU registrars including Nominet redact most personal registrant details by default, so this is far less of a decision you need to make yourself. It's still worth checking your registrar's privacy settings when you buy a domain, particularly if you're a sole trader registering in your own name rather than a company name.

Protecting the domain once you've chosen it

Beyond buying obvious misspellings, it's worth setting a calendar reminder for renewal well before your domain expires. Expired domains are sometimes picked up within hours by unrelated parties, and reclaiming one can be slow and costly. If your business trades under a registered trade mark, that also gives you a stronger route to challenge a copycat domain than relying on the registrar's dispute process alone.

The core judgement hasn't changed since 2014: pick something short, easy to say, easy to type, and free of anything that could embarrass you later. What has changed is the reason. You're no longer choosing a domain to game a search algorithm, you're choosing one because it's the name your customers will trust, remember and type correctly, which matters just as much now as it ever did.