A domain name is the one decision on this whole list that's genuinely hard to undo. You can redesign a site, rewrite the words, change the logo. Changing the domain after customers know it means losing some of them and explaining yourself to the rest. So it's worth ten minutes of thinking, and not much more than ten.
The only three rules that matter
Most domain advice is overthought. Here's the short version that holds up.
Say-able out loud. The real test isn't how it looks; it's whether you can tell someone your domain across a counter, in a noisy room, without spelling it. If it needs spelling, it's wrong. This kills most "clever" names instantly.
No hyphens, no numbers, no traps. "best-plumber-2026.com" has a hyphen people forget, a number people write as a word, and a year that's wrong in eleven months. Every one of those is a customer who typed it slightly wrong and landed nowhere.
Your name or your thing, plus where you are. For a local business, your business name is usually the right answer because it matches your sign, your truck, and what people already say. If the name's taken, adding the town often works and helps locally: it's a real phrase people search.
.com still wins, and it's not close
People ask if the ending matters. For a local business in 2026: yes, get the .com if you possibly can. Not because the others don't work technically — they do — but because customers still assume .com, type .com out of habit, and a meaningful share of them will land on whoever owns the .com version of your name. If that's a competitor or a parked page, you bought them traffic.
Country domains have their place — a Belgian shop on a .be reads as local and that's fine. But if you're choosing fresh and the .com is available, take it.
The clever ideas that always age badly
I've watched all of these go wrong. The pun nobody gets without explanation. The trendy spelling that drops a vowel. The name built around one service you offered in 2024 and quietly stopped offering. The cute thing that's impossible to dictate over a phone.
Clever is a tax you pay forever, every time someone has to find you. Boring and obvious is a gift you give your future self.
Register it in your own name. This is not optional.
Here is the part that actually costs people their business, and it has nothing to do with the words in the name.
Whoever the domain is registered to controls it. If your designer, your nephew, or some agency registers it "to save you the hassle," they own the front door to your business and you're a tenant who didn't read the lease. When the relationship ends — and relationships end — that becomes the worst phone call you'll make that year.
Register it yourself, in your name, on your card, in an account you control. It costs about fifteen dollars a year. We walk every client through doing exactly this and we never hold it for you, because owner of record is the whole point.
If you already have one you regret
It happens. Maybe you inherited a bad domain, maybe someone else holds yours. Moving is doable — it's not free and it's not instant, but it's a known process and it's better done deliberately than after a crisis. Send us what you've got and we'll tell you whether it's worth changing or worth keeping. Sometimes the honest answer is: it's fine, leave it, spend the money on the site instead.