How to choose a domain name: the name, the extension and the checks before you buy

A domain is the one part of a website you keep for as long as the business exists. You can change the design, the platform and the hosting; changing the domain means moving every link, bookmark and search ranking you have earned. Choosing it takes an afternoon, and most of the mistakes people make are easy to avoid once you know them. This guide covers what makes a good name, how to choose between .com, a country domain and the newer extensions, what Google says about keywords in domains, who may register .de, .ro and .eu, and what to check before you pay. Registry figures are from mid-2026.

The short answer

Pick a short name that people can spell after hearing it once, ideally your brand rather than a description of what you sell. Take .com if you sell internationally, or the country domain if your customers are in one country. Check that nobody holds a trademark on the name, register it in your company’s name on an account you control, and turn on automatic renewal. Everything else in this guide explains those five sentences.

The name: short, sayable and yours

Choose a name people can remember and spell after hearing it once; keywords in the domain do almost nothing for search. Google’s own SEO starter guide says that, from a ranking perspective, keywords in the domain name alone have hardly any effect. What a domain does is get typed, said on the phone, printed on a van and remembered a week later, and that is where names fail: hyphens that nobody says out loud, numbers that could be a digit or a word, double letters where two words meet, and spellings that are clever on paper and wrong when spoken.

A brand name also ages better than a description. A domain such as cheap-websites-bucharest says exactly one thing and stops fitting the day you raise prices, add a city or start building apps. Short matters less than it used to, since most visitors arrive from a search or a link, but every extra word is another chance to mistype it. A useful test: say the name to someone over the phone and ask them to type it. If they ask how it is spelled, keep looking.

Which extension

At the end of June 2026 there were 401.6 million registered domains, according to Verisign’s quarterly industry brief. 166.6 million of them were .com, which is still what people type when they guess, and 148.6 million were country domains, led by China’s .cn and Germany’s .de. Google treats a country domain as a strong signal that a site is meant for that country, and its SEO starter guide adds that the extension only matters if you are targeting a specific country; otherwise Google does not care which one you use.

Not every two-letter extension counts as a country. Google treats .io, .ai, .co, .me, .tv and more than a dozen others as generic, because people use them that way, and it treats .eu as generic too. New extensions such as .shop, .agency or .london give no advantage or disadvantage in search, Google has said since 2015, so they are a fair choice when they make a name memorable. Their weak spot is people: someone who hears your name may still type .com, and some email filters and older systems treat unfamiliar extensions with suspicion. Country domains also depend on the country: .io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the UK’s 2025 agreement to hand the territory to Mauritius has left that extension’s long-term future open, even if nothing has changed for it so far.

Our own setup: one brand, three country domains

We run levelui.com in English, levelui.de in German and levelui.ro in Romanian: one codebase built three times, once per language, each on its own domain, and linked to each other with hreflang so that Google shows each visitor the right one. We chose it because a German customer trusts a .de address, a Romanian one a .ro, and the .com covers everyone else, and because each domain then targets its country with no extra setup.

Country domains suit a business that runs each market as its own site; for most others, one domain with a folder per language is less work. Each of our three domains has to earn links and trust on its own, needs its own Search Console property, and has to be renewed, secured and monitored separately. A single .com with /de/ and /ro/ folders shares all of that. We compare the two setups, and subdomains, in multilingual SEO architecture.

Checks before you buy

Search the trademark registers first. EUIPO’s TMview searches the EU trademark register and most national ones in one place, including Germany’s DPMA and Romania’s OSIM. A domain that matches someone else’s registered mark in your line of business can be taken from you through a dispute procedure, and .ro has its own variant of the international one, run with WIPO. Check the social media handles you want at the same time, because a name you can use everywhere is worth more than a slightly better one you cannot.

Then look at the domain’s past if it was registered before. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows what used to be there; a previous life as a spam or casino site is worth knowing about before you build on it. Read the name in the other languages your customers speak, and say it with the extension attached, because words can run together in ways nobody noticed. Finally, decide which other extensions you need. Owning the .com and your country domain, with one redirecting to the other, stops someone else from catching your visitors who guess.

Register it properly

Register the domain in your company’s name, on an account you control, with automatic renewal and two-factor login turned on. A domain held by a developer, an agency or a former employee is a business risk that only shows up when the relationship ends, and an expired domain can be registered by anyone once the grace period runs out, often by people who buy expired names for their traffic. Keep the payment card on the account current, and use the registrar’s transfer lock so nobody can move the domain without you.

Compare renewal prices rather than first-year offers, which are often discounted. Check the extension’s rules too: anyone can register a .de, but a holder outside Germany must name an authorised recipient in Germany if DENIC asks for one; .ro registration is unrestricted, apart from some second-level endings such as .com.ro; and .eu is limited to citizens of the EU and EEA, wherever they live, and to residents and organisations established there. Our guide to building a website covers the rest of what you should own in your own name.

When the name you want is taken

Most good one-word .com names were registered long ago. The usual ways out are adding a short word that fits the brand, such as the trade, the city or a verb like get or try; using your country domain if your market is local; or choosing one of the newer extensions if it makes the name better rather than just available. Be careful with taking the .net or .org of a name whose .com belongs to someone in your own industry: their site will receive a share of your visitors and your email.

A taken domain can sometimes be bought. If it shows a parking page with an offer, or the owner answers, use an escrow service rather than paying directly, and expect the price to depend on how much the seller thinks you need it. If it is in active use by a real business, assume it is not for sale and move on.

Changing the domain later

It can be done, and Google treats a move to a new domain, including a new extension, like any other site move. That means redirecting every old address to its new equivalent, one by one, telling Google through Search Console’s change of address tool, and keeping the old domain renewed for at least a year, ideally for good, so the redirects keep working for old links and bookmarks. Rankings often fluctuate for a while during a move. It is a project, not an afternoon, which is the best argument for choosing carefully the first time.

If you are starting a new site or moving an old one, we register and connect the domain in your name as part of our hosting and deployment work. And if the name itself is still open, it belongs with the rest of the brand identity: the name, the logo and the domain work best when they are decided together.

Sources

Registration figures from Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief for the second quarter of 2026. Google’s statements and the registry rules were checked on 10 October 2026.

• Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide ↗

  Keywords in the domain name alone have hardly any effect on ranking; the extension only matters when targeting a specific country.

• Google Search Central — Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites ↗

  Country domains as a strong signal for one country, and the list of country codes Google treats as generic, including .io, .ai, .co, .me and .tv.

• Google Search Central Blog — Google’s handling of new top level domains ↗

  New extensions are treated like other generic ones; keywords in the extension give no advantage or disadvantage; city extensions such as .london are generic.

• Verisign — Domain Name Industry Brief, Q2 2026 ↗

  401.6 million domains at the end of June 2026: 166.6 million .com, 148.6 million country domains, with .cn and .de the largest.

• DENIC — Authorised recipient for holders abroad ↗

  A .de holder outside Germany must name a recipient in Germany for official documents when requested.

• WIPO — .RO country code domain ↗

  Registration of .ro names is unrestricted, except some second-level endings; the .ro dispute policy is a variation of the UDRP.

• EURid — Rules for .eu domains ↗

  Who may register a .eu domain.

• EUIPO — TMview ↗

  Searches the EU trademark register and the national registers, including Germany’s and Romania’s, in one place.

• Google Search Central — Site moves with URL changes ↗

  How to move a site to a new domain: redirects, Search Console and how long to keep the old domain.