A domain name is the address of your website. Ours is hammerandpixel.co.uk. Yours might be wakefieldroofing.co.uk. It is the bit a customer types, or the bit they see in the Google results before they tap.
What you are actually paying for
You do not buy a domain outright. You register it for a year or a few years at a time, through a company called a registrar, and you keep it for as long as you keep paying the yearly fee. Stop paying and it goes back on the open market, usually after a grace period.
The name itself is separate from the website. The domain is the address. The hosting is the building. You can move the website to a different host and keep the same address, which is why owning the domain in your own name matters so much.
A worked example
A roofer in Wakefield had his site built by a friend of a friend in 2019. The domain was registered in the friend's name, on the friend's card. Five years later the friend had moved on and stopped answering the phone. The roofer could not move his site, could not change his email, and could not stop the address expiring.
He ended up starting again on a new address and lost every link and every Google listing pointing at the old one. The fix was a ten minute job at the start: register the domain yourself, in your own name, on your own card.
Choosing one
Short, easy to say down the phone, easy to spell. A .co.uk reads as local and British to a homeowner, and that is usually the right signal for a trade. Avoid hyphens and numbers, because you will be reading it out loud in a van for the next ten years.
Why it matters for your site
Check these on your own site
- Register it in your own name and keep the login. It is your address, not your web company's.
- Set it to auto renew, and keep the card on it current.
- Keep the same domain when you rebuild your site, so you keep your Google history.
- Use an email on your own domain, not a free webmail address. It reads as a real firm.
- One domain is enough. Buying twenty variations does nothing for your ranking.
Common questions
Do I own my domain name forever once I have bought it?
No. You register it for a set period, usually a year or more, and you keep it while you keep renewing. If the renewal fails it expires and can be taken by somebody else.
Should a UK tradesperson use .co.uk or .com?
For a firm working in one part of the UK, .co.uk is usually the better choice for a firm working one patch of the UK, because it says where you are. A .com is fine too, and either can rank.