How to come up with a good domain name for your website
When starting a new website, the two most important things that you should get in order to take it online are a domain name and hosting.
In this article, we focus on the domain name. You will learn what a domain name is, the qualities of a good name, and how to come up with a cool domain name for your website.
What is a domain name?
A domain name is a name (address) that uniquely identifies a website on the Internet, which will be used by your users to access it.
For instance, the domain name for this website is webdevsplanet.com (some people may prefer writing it as www.webdevsplanet.com). Whenever you type it in your browser address bar and hit enter, it will always bring you to this website because it is only unique to it.
Qualities of a good domain name
1). Should be short
When choosing a domain name for your website, always try to find one that is as short as possible. It is not by a mere coincidence that all the most popular websites in the world have short domain names. Examples: google.com, facebook.com, youtube.com, amazon.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com, quora.com etc.
There is no definite number of characters to use but the shorter the name, the better. I recommend a domain name not exceeding 20 characters if possible.
Avoid using names with more than three words in them.
Short domain names are always easy to read and remember.
2). Easy to spell
Most people do not bookmark the websites they visit but rely on their memory to remember the address. You don't want to lose your website visitors just because they can't spell your domain name. Avoid names such as ghysqlyd.com which will be next to impossible to spell. Avoid using complex vocabulary words. Use simple language names that are easy to spell for your intended audience without much hassle.
3). Should have a good extension
A domain extension is the last part of the domain name that starts with a dot(.), Eg. on webdevsplanet.com, “.com” is the domain extension.
Examples of commonly known extensions
| .com | commercial enterprises |
| .org | non-profit organizations |
| .ac | academic institutions |
| .edu | education institutions |
| .net | networking companies |
| .co.countrycode | commercial enterprises targeting a certain country eg .co.uk |
| .or.countrycode | non-profit organizations targeting a specific country eg .or.us |
There are actually more than a thousand of them so we cannot manage to cover all of them.
So which should you choose for your specific domain?
Organizations may prefer a .org, academic/education institutions may go with a .edu or .ac. For your business or personal website/blog it is recommendable to go with a “.com” extension as it is the most popular.
According to Statista, as of April 2021, 52.3% of websites globally used a .com top-level domain.
Also, when people see your domain name, they are likely not to pay much attention to its extension but to the name. The next time they want to access your website they will assume it's .com and may end up on someone else’s website or get a "website not found" error.
4). Should not contain hyphens and numbers
Including numbers and hyphens in the domain name is not advisable. Most people will forget where in the name the hyphen appears.
They may also end up spelling the number eg. writing 5star.com as fivestar.com.
This may confuse people and they end up not visiting your website.
Two commonly used approaches of coming up with a domain include:
- From brand name
- A description of what the website or business is about
Brand name domain
It is a common practice to derive the website domain name from the business/company name. Let's say your company name is “Company XYZ”, your domain name could be companyxyz.com.
If your company has a very long name you may shorten the name by using initials for the domain. A good example of a website using initials is cnn.com which is a short form for Cable News Network.
For the case of a personal website or blog, you can use your name as the domain name in addition to your preferred domain extension eg johndoe.com for a person named “John Doe”.
Advantages
- It helps improve your brand identity
- It may lead to an increase in website traffic – People who know your business/company name and want to know more may get into your website without even necessarily knowing your web address but just trying to use the brand name as the address. I have personally discovered many business websites by guessing the address from the company name.
Descriptive domain name
This involves the use of keywords in the domain name that describe what the business or website is all about.
If for example, you offer website design services in India, you can come up with a domain name such as webdesignidia.com, webdesign.in, etc.
Advantages
- People usually get the idea of what your website is all about when they see the domain name – This saves them from guessing and leaving your website after realizing it’s different from what they expected to find.
- Improved search engine optimization – Search engine optimization(SEO) is a set of practices done to improve a website rank in search engine results (eg Google). Having a keyword in your domain that people are likely to search for along with other SEO practices will boost your rankings. FOr instance, when a person searches for “US news”, usnews.com is very likely to appear among the top search results.
Note:
It is very common to come up with a very good domain name only to find that it is already taken/not available when trying to register it for your website.
This happens so many times.
For this reason, I would recommend you prepare several domain names so that in case your first choice is taken you can easily pick the second or the third option.
