How to Find and Buy The Perfect Domain Name

Finding a good domain name for your website or blog can for a lot of people become a blocking factor, as it is never as easy as one might think. Getting a domain for your blog involves multiple steps such as:

• Choosing the right web domain
• Buying and registering the domain
• Connecting the domain to your blog

This article will cover some of the most common things to go over when acquiring and setting up your domain. If you are interested in learning more on how to create your own blog, you can check out our blog post on how to start a blog.

Choosing the right domain

Let me pitch you a common scenario: you have just come up with the perfect name for your newly created blog, and now you just need to register a domain that resembles that name in order to get your blog online on the internet. But once you find yourself on the domain registrars website, you realize that your dream domain has already been taken - what do you do now?

Finding and picking the correct domain name for your website can be tedious. According to the page Diggity Marketing, there have been registered over a whopping 350 million domains worldwide. This makes it no wonder that it can be a difficult task finding an available domain name for your blog, and is the reason that you need to be creative and think out of the box when coming up with your domain names. Here are some of the ways you can select a domain name that is related to your blog but is still available:

Be creative with your naming

When coming up with your domain name, it can be a good idea to get creative with your naming in order to find a domain name that hasn’t already been taken. This includes techniques such as:

• Use synonym words. Do some research and see if there are alternative ways of creating the same message.
• Use acronyms. Condensing the name of your blog or website down to an acronym can make your domain more unique which increases the chances that it’s available to register. An example of using an acronym in its website domain is The New York Times who uses the domain nytimes.com. Using an acronym can also have the benefit of making your domain name shorter and easier to memorize.
• Try different top-level domains. Top-level domains (TLD), also often referred to as domain extensions, is the short suffix that follows a domain name (for instance the most commonly used .com). While it is most preferred to use a common TLD (we’ll get into this later), a way of coming up with a more unique domain name that might be available is to try out different TLDs of your wanted domain. Sometimes the TLD can even be incorporated into the sitename itself (YouTube for example has the domain youtu.be).
• Use a domain name generator. There exists a large amount of “generators” online that lets you create a domain name by inputting various things such as keyword, genre og category. The drawback of using a domain name generator is that it might not always come up particularly great results that resemble what you are going for. A good use of domain name generators is to get inspiration from the suggested domain names and treat them as mere domain name ideas.

Lately there's also been an upspring in AI tools that can help with coming up with domain and blog names with one of these being the site One Word Domain, though these domains are more focused on making brandable and more business-oriented domains.

Pick a common top level domain

When choosing a domain name, you also want to think about which TLD you want your domain to have. A domain consists of two different parts: the second-level domain (SLD) and the top-level domain (TLD). The SLD is usually the first part of a domain (eg. facebook) and the TLD is the suffix that follows it (.com) - top-level domains are also sometimes referred to as website extensions or domain name endings.

While the SLD is the part where you can express creativity and use your imagination, there are some more common rules tied to picking the TLD. One of the most important points of picking a TLD is picking a domain name with a common TLD (like .com) as foreign and uncommon TLDs (.biz, .vip or .website) might make people distrust your website before even visiting it.

The above information might still vary depending on the geographic location of your target group, as many websites can also benefit from using a country-code TLD their own country or region (like .dk for Denmark or .it for Italy). If you want to know more about country specific domains, you check out our article on country code top-level domains (ccLTDs).

Don’t be cheap

A domain with a proper TLD like .com will usually not set your back more than around $10-15 for a year, and having a professional looking domain can benefit you a lot down the road. It can be tempting to use services that offer free or very cheap TLDs such as .online, .shop or .xyz, but these low-quality domains can end up negatively affecting your traffic in the long run.

It is also very difficult to change your domain once you have established yourself on search engines as switching your blog or website to a new domain will fully reset the way that Google and other search engines see your website and your content might take a long time to recover and be re-indexed. While getting a domain name for free might be tempting, we recommend you invest in a proper and higher quality domain from the get go.

Registering your domain

Buying and registering your domain is done by going to a domain registrar. Domain registrars are businesses responsible for mapping a domain name to a specific IP address (domain to website) on the internet (kind of how a phone book works for phone numbers and names). Some of the most popular domain registrars are:

• Namecheap
• Google Domains
• Cloudflare Registrar

Often domain name registrars will also offer a domain name search feature that lets you check out available domain names and TLDs in an orderly fashion. These searches might also come with additional suggestions for website names and domains.

Picking the right domain registrar for you

While prices for a domain might vary a little bit between different registrars, there can be much more important factors to include when deciding what registrar to use such as:

• Easy to use and good user experience. Most domain registrars offer an administration panel for managing your domains. Having a good overview of your domain configurations can save you a lot of trouble down the road when setting up your domain for your website.
• Good customer service. Managing and configuring domains can sometimes require a lot of technical experience and in such cases it is a huge benefit to be able to contact a customer service - this is especially true if you need to perform actions such as domain transfers or renewals of your domain.
• Respect for privacy. Domain names are often tied to personal information about the person who acquired the domain, but a lot of domain registrars offer ways of protecting your privacy for certain domain LTDs.

Being stuck with the wrong domain registrar can be a horrible experience so it’s a good idea to do your due diligence before committing to one. Read user-supplied reviews on different registrars to make sure that there is positive sentiment for the registrar you are looking to buy your domain with.