A domain costs a few pounds a year, so it is easy to settle quickly. But that name ends up on business cards, signage, email addresses, search results and receipts, and after a few years changing it costs hundreds of times what it cost to buy. It is worth another thirty minutes.
One test — can you read it down the phone?
The practical test that separates good domains from bad is a single question: can you say it once on the phone and have the other person type it correctly? That test alone filters out most trouble.
Several things fail it. Hyphens have to be spoken aloud and are routinely dropped. Digits mixed with letters (4 and “for”, 0 and o) prompt a follow-up question every time. So do words whose spelling cannot be inferred from the sound, and names that have more than one accepted romanisation.
The choices people regret
The most common is naming what you sell right now. A shop that only sold cakes adds lunch boxes and the name becomes a liability — by which point regulars already arrive at that address. Business scope changes more often than people expect.
Check trade marks before you buy. Domain registration is separate from trade mark law, so registering something similar to an existing mark is technically possible. The problem arrives once you are known. A quick search of the relevant registry for identical or similar marks in your sector is time well spent.
Extensions — there is a safe default
.com remains the safest. It is what people append by reflex when recalling an address, so anything else means occasionally losing customers to the .com. A well-established country extension is a good choice too when you trade mainly in one market.
Novelty extensions are cheap and the name you want is usually free, but they tend to attract more spam filtering on outbound mail. If enquiry email is how your business runs, do not take that lightly.
If the .com of the name you want is taken, finding a different name is generally better than buying the same name on another extension — the fact that it is taken means someone else is already using that name.
Two things to get right at registration
Expiry is a more common accident than it should be. Change the card you registered with, have renewal notices going to an address you no longer read, and one day the site and the mail stop together. Check today that renewal notices arrive at an inbox you actually read.
The hosting decision that goes alongside the domain is covered in the first part of the launching on your own series, and wider infrastructure judgement lives in the Servers & infrastructure archive. To have an existing site brought up to standard as one job, see our optimization program.