Choosing a domain in 2026: .com, .co.uk, or something newer?

The advice most people were given a decade ago — get the .com, at any cost, or you are not a real business — has quietly stopped being true. Not because .com got worse, but because buyers stopped reading extensions as a status signal.

What has not changed is that this is a decision you live with for years, so it is worth twenty minutes rather than two.

What actually matters in the name

In rough order:

• Can someone spell it after hearing it once? This is the whole test for a business that gets recommended by word of mouth. If you have to say “with a K”, you have already lost some of them.
• Is it short enough to type on a phone? Not a rule about characters — a rule about thumbs.
• Does it survive you changing what you sell? manchesterwindowcleaning is excellent until you move to Leeds or add gutters.
• Is it free of hyphens and numbers? Both create ambiguity when spoken aloud, which is where most of the damage happens.
• Is anyone else trading under it? Check Companies House and the trademark register before you commit. Getting this wrong is the expensive mistake in this article.

Notice that exact-match keywords are not on the list. Owning cheapplumberleeds.com has not been a meaningful ranking advantage for a long time, and it makes a business sound like a directory listing.

Which extension

.co.uk — if your customers are in the UK, this is the safe default. It signals local, it is cheap, and British buyers do not read it as second-tier.

.com — right if you sell internationally, or if you want the version people type by reflex. Worth holding alongside your .co.uk if you can get it, pointed at the same site.

.uk — shorter, newer, still less familiar. Fine to hold defensively; less certain as your primary.

Newer extensions — .studio, .online, .agency, .shop and hundreds more. These are legitimate, they are indexed exactly like anything else, and Google has been explicit that the extension is not a ranking factor. The real question is whether your particular customers will accept it. A design studio on .studio reads deliberately. A solicitor on .click does not.

We will declare our own hand here: this site is on a newer extension. It has been no obstacle at all — and we would still tell a high-street solicitor to take the .co.uk.

Country codes that are not your country — .io, .ai, .co, .me. These are borrowed national domains and they carry a category of risk that the others do not. That is a whole article: why a borrowed country code is a business decision.

The pricing trick to watch for

Here is the one thing to take away. That £0.01 first year is real, and so is the renewal.

A .co.uk advertised at a penny commonly renews between £12 and £27. A .com between £15 and £22. The registry sets a wholesale price; the registrar adds whatever margin it likes; and the introductory offer is a customer-acquisition cost they expect to recover from year two onwards.

None of that is a scam. It only becomes a problem when you register nine domains on penny deals and get a £180 bill you did not plan for.

Always look at the renewal price before you buy, and look at it for every domain you are about to register, not just the main one.

Transfers work differently by extension

A detail almost nobody mentions, and it matters when you leave a registrar you have fallen out with:

• .com, .net, .org — transferring carries your remaining time across, and most registrars add a free year on top. You are paying for a year and keeping what you had.
• .co.uk, .uk — a transfer is an IPS tag change. No new registration period is added, and your existing expiry date stands. It is usually free and usually fast.

How many should you register?

Fewer than domain sellers would like. Buying every extension and misspelling is a tax you pay annually, forever.

A reasonable position for most small businesses: your primary, the obvious alternate extension if it is cheap, and one common misspelling only if it is genuinely common. Everything beyond that is money better spent on the site.

Before you commit

1. Say it out loud to someone who has not seen it written down. Ask them to spell it back.
2. Check Companies House and the trademark register.
3. Check the renewal price, not the first-year price.
4. Check whether the matching social handles are free — easier to adjust the name now than to rebrand later.
5. Register it in your company's name, in an account you control.

If you are naming a business and want a second opinion before you commit, a free call costs you nothing. And once it is registered, understanding what you actually hold takes ten minutes and saves a bad afternoon later.