Five rules that survive contact with reality
- Sayable before memorable. Most of your traffic will arrive because someone said your name out loud. Ambiguous spelling costs you those people silently and forever.
- Short, but not cryptic. Under about fifteen characters is comfortable. Truncating your business name into an unpronounceable stub is not shorter, it is worse.
- No hyphens, no numbers. Both create the "is it the digit or the word?" problem, and hyphenated domains carry a faint whiff of the discount aisle.
- Your name beats your keyword. A domain stuffed with the service and the city looks like an ad, ages badly when you expand, and does far less for rankings than people believe.
- Check it before you fall in love. Search the name. Look for an existing business, an unfortunate word made by the run-together letters, and whether the matching social handles are free.
Does it have to be .com?
No, and the honest answer is more nuanced than either camp will tell you. A .com remains the default assumption in the United States, so if you take a different extension, expect to be asked "is that dot com?" for the rest of your life. That is an ongoing tax, not a disaster.
Other extensions are perfectly respectable and often let you have a much better name. Search engines do not rank a .com higher for being a .com. What matters more is that people can type it and that you are not one typo away from a competitor.
What I would avoid: taking a strange extension only because your exact .com is parked, when a slightly different name would get you a clean .com. The name is more flexible than you think in the first week and completely rigid after year one.
Buying it properly
- Register it yourself, in your own name, on your own card. Not your designer's account, not your nephew's. This is the whole of the ownership article in one line.
- Turn on auto-renew and privacy. Expired domains get bought within minutes by people who noticed before you did. Privacy keeps your home address out of a public database.
- Use an email address you will still have. Not the one from your old job or your former internet provider.
- Ignore the upsells. Registrars will offer you five variant domains, premium DNS and an email package. You need the domain. You can add the rest later if you ever actually need it.
The bit people forget: email
Buying the domain is also the moment you get proper business email. An address at your own domain reads as a real business in a way a free consumer address never quite does, and it means you keep your contact address if you ever change providers.
Pageory runs on a shared address at its own domain for exactly that reason. If you want to know what is involved — and what breaks if the mail records are set up wrong — ask when we speak. It is a twenty-minute job to do right and a genuinely painful one to unpick later.