Naming and domains
How to choose a domain name
A domain is rented by the year rather than bought, and the name on the account matters more than the name on the sign. Most first-time owners spend a week agonising over whether a name is clever and ten minutes on the two things that actually go wrong later: the renewal price nobody looked at, and the account it was registered in. Six steps follow, and every one of them ends with something you can check today.
Allow about an hour if you already have two or three candidates — roughly twenty minutes on the legal checks, twenty comparing registrars, and twenty to register and lock it — and sleep on the shortlist one night before you pay for anything.
Have these ready before you start.
- Two or three candidate names rather than one favourite. Every check below eliminates candidates, and arriving with a single name means you talk yourself into a compromise instead of moving to the next one on the list.
- The two free searches that cover the place you will trade in: your national or state company registry, and your national trademark register. Both are public, both are free, and neither needs an account.
- A payment card, and an email address that will still be yours in five years — ideally not one issued by an internet provider or an employer. Every renewal notice goes to that address, and a renewal notice nobody reads is how domains get lost.
Run the say-it-out-loud test before anything else
Read each candidate down a phone line to somebody who has never seen it written, and ask them to type what they heard. That one test kills more bad names than every other check combined. Watch for the four failures it exposes: a word with two accepted spellings (centre and center, grey and gray), a letter and a number that sound identical (to and 2, for and 4), a doubled letter where two words join (kids plus stuff becomes kidsstuff, and nobody can hear how many s there are), and a hyphen, which nobody says out loud and everybody drops. Then say the whole thing as one unbroken string, because that is how it gets read: the site that registered expertsexchange.com and later moved to experts-exchange.com is the standard cautionary tale about what two innocent words do when you push them together. They fixed it with a hyphen, which is the least bad option once the name is already printed on things — and the reason to run this test before you buy rather than after. Keep it short enough to fit on a shopfront and plain enough to write on a receipt. If you have no candidates at all yet, the free store name generator at /tools joins a keyword to what you do and hands you a list to start deleting from; it checks nothing on your behalf, so every step below is still yours to do.
Check the company registry and the trademark register, in that order
An available domain is not a free name. Search your company or business registry first, for the exact name and for near-identical variants: the same words in a different order, singular and plural, and the same name carrying a different legal suffix. Then search the national trademark register the same way, and search it against the class that covers your line of work, because a mark registered for coffee does not stop you using the word for plumbing. Only then check whether the domain is free. Running the checks in this order is what stops you falling in love with a name you cannot legally trade under. If you find an identical mark in your own class, stop and take the next candidate — rebranding in month three costs far more than another week of thinking now. If it is close rather than identical and real money is riding on the name, that is the moment when an hour with a trademark attorney is the cheap option.
Decide between .com and your local ending
Pick the one people will type without thinking, and be clear that you are choosing a default rather than a category. A hand that is guessing still types .com, so if your customers could be anywhere and the name is free there, take it. A local ending says where you are and is often available when the .com is not, but several of them come with a condition on who is allowed to hold one. .co.uk is run by Nominet and open to anyone. .de wants an administrative contact with an address in Germany. .ca has a Canadian presence requirement, .us a US nexus requirement, and .eu is limited to people and organisations in the EU or the EEA. Read the requirement before you fall for the name, because it is a condition of holding the domain rather than a form you fill in once. Newer endings such as .shop, .cafe or .studio are technically fine, and .app and .dev sit on the HSTS preload list so browsers force HTTPS on them, which is a feature rather than a catch. Two rules save most of the trouble here. First, if the exact .com is an active business in a related line of work, that is a naming collision rather than a domain problem, so go back to step one. Second, if you take the local ending while somebody else holds the .com, accept that a share of your customers will land there, and check before you commit that the person holding it is not a competitor.
Compare the renewal price, never the first-year price
The number on the banner is a discount, and the number you will pay every year afterwards is usually somewhere further down the same page. Open each registrar's pricing page, find the renewal row rather than the registration row, and write both figures side by side for the same ending. For scale, here is the floor underneath all of them: the .com wholesale price Verisign charges every registrar is US$10.26 a year, rising just under 7% to US$10.97 on 1 November 2026 under its registry agreement, plus an ICANN fee of US$0.18 per domain per year. So a one-dollar first year is a registrar buying your business, and it has to come back later. Cloudflare Registrar publishes an at-cost policy under which registration and renewal are the same price; most registrars mark up, and most mark up more at renewal than at signup. While you are on that page, find the transfer-out fee and the restore fee as well — ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires registrars to publish all of them. The prices quoted here were checked in August 2026 and will drift; the method is the part that stays true.
Register it in your own account, in your own name
Create the registrar account yourself, with your own email address and your own card, and complete the purchase yourself even when a designer or a relative is doing the rest of the work. A domain sitting inside somebody else's account is the one asset in this whole process you cannot rebuild: a website can be remade in an afternoon, but a name in someone else's control stays in someone else's control. Put the business's legal name in the registrant field and your own working email in the contact fields, then turn on the privacy setting so your home address and phone number are not published in the public record — your registrar will call it WHOIS privacy, domain privacy or ID protection. Before you close the tab, turn on two-factor authentication for the registrar account itself. If the ending you chose carries a presence requirement, have the qualifying address or company number to hand before you start, because that is checked at registration rather than afterwards. And if a contractor has already registered a domain on your behalf, ask for the transfer now, while everyone is still getting along, rather than at the point you fall out.
Turn on auto-renew and the registrar lock, then write down the date
Two switches, both in the registrar's settings for that domain. Most registrars turn auto-renew on and lock the domain at registration, but neither is guaranteed — so check both rather than assuming. With auto-renew on, check that the card on file expires later than the domain does, because an expired card is the most common way an auto-renew fails silently. The second switch is the registrar lock, which stops anybody starting a transfer without unlocking it first; some registrars label it simply Locked. Then verify both from the outside rather than trusting the toggle: look the domain up at lookup.icann.org, ICANN's own lookup tool, and read two lines back — the Status line, which you want to say clientTransferProhibited, and the expiry date. Put that expiry date in your own calendar with a two-week warning, because a registrar reminder goes to exactly one address and reminder emails go missing. The stakes are specific. After a .com expires it is deleted, then sits in a 30-day redemption grace period, then five days of pending delete, after which anyone may register it — and pulling a name back out of redemption typically costs US$80–150 at retail rather than the price of a renewal.
Four things to do once the name is yours.
- Point it at your site and confirm the padlock yourself. Publishing with Naratake puts the site on a hosted address with HTTPS handled for you, and either cloud plan carries one custom domain; what else each plan includes is on the pricing page. Once it resolves, open the domain in a private browser window, confirm the address begins with https, and confirm that the www and non-www forms both reach the same page instead of one of them failing quietly.
- Decide about email before you need it. An address at your own domain outlives any free mailbox, and setting one up means adding MX records wherever your DNS is managed. Whether you do it now or later, write down where that is — moving a website without knowing where the DNS lives is how a business loses its email for a day.
- Write the domain dossier and keep it somewhere that is not your inbox: which registrar, which account email, where the two-factor codes live, the expiry date, and who else can sign in. One page. This is the document that matters when a phone is lost or a staff member leaves, and nobody has ever managed to write it after the emergency started.
- Use one written form of the web address everywhere and never a second. Choose lower case, decide about the www, and put that exact string on the shopfront, the receipts, the invoices, the social profiles and your Google Business Profile. The free QR code generator at /tools turns it into something you can tape to the counter, and getting the name, address, phone and hours to match everywhere is worth more than any clever spelling.
Questions that come up
The .com I want is taken. Now what?
Look at what is actually there before you reach for your wallet. If it resolves to a working business in a related line of work, treat it as a naming collision and take the next candidate — staying means competing for the same searches while carrying a trademark risk at the same time. If it is a parked page or a for-sale listing, a broker will quote you a price, and aftermarket prices run from a few hundred to genuinely absurd with no fixed relationship to what the name is worth to you. For a first shop, adding a word usually beats buying the name outright: add what you do, add your city or your neighbourhood, or add the word your customers already use for you. A local ending is the other honest answer, provided you have checked who holds the .com.
Should I buy the other endings and the common misspellings too?
Usually not on day one. Every extra name is another renewal every year and another line on the list you have to remember, and defensive registration has no natural stopping point. A reasonable position for a small business: register the one you will actually use, plus the local ending if you trade locally and it is cheap. Revisit it if the name starts turning up in places you did not put it. Do check that nobody already holds an ending that would embarrass you — checking is free, and holding is not.
Does the domain name help me rank in a search engine?
Not in the way the question implies, and nobody can promise you a position. Packing a keyword into the domain is not a shortcut; search engines stopped treating exact-match domains as a signal worth much a long time ago, and a name assembled out of keywords usually reads worse to the humans who have to say it aloud. What is within your control: real pages carrying your trading name, address and services in plain text, a claimed Google Business Profile, and the same name, address, phone and hours everywhere they appear. A short memorable name earns you people typing it in directly, which does not depend on a search engine at all.
Can I change the domain later if I get it wrong?
Yes, and it is survivable, but the cost is spread out in places you will not see coming: redirects to set up and then keep paying attention to, printed material to reprint, listings and profiles to edit one at a time, email addresses to migrate, and links on other people's sites that you cannot edit at all. There are timing rules as well, and most of them are your registrar's rather than ICANN's: registrars commonly lock a domain against transfer for up to 60 days after it is registered, after it is moved, and after the registrant details change, so this is not a same-day operation. ICANN's own rule about that last lock is mid-revision, so read your registrar's transfer page rather than a blog post — checked in August 2026. None of that is a reason to freeze. It is a reason to spend one more evening on step one than you think you need.
Once the name is settled, the website is the shorter half. Naratake runs in a browser and starts from 40 industry layouts rather than a blank page, each already carrying the sections that kind of business expects, and publishing puts the result on a hosted address with HTTPS handled for you. Either cloud plan lets you connect one domain of your own; what each one includes is on the pricing page.
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