How to buy a domain name
The buying takes ten minutes and costs about the price of a takeaway coffee per month. What matters is the small number of decisions around it — because a domain is the one asset in your marketing that everything else points at, and the three ways people lose control of it are all avoidable in the first ten minutes.
Choosing which one
.co.uk or .com? If you trade in the UK and serve UK customers, .co.uk is completely normal and nobody thinks less of it. .com matters if you sell internationally or want the broader recognition. Buying both and pointing one at the other is cheap and removes the question.
Keep it the same as your business name wherever possible. A domain that does not match what you are called costs you every time someone tries to guess it, and guessing is what people do.
Avoid what you would avoid in a business name: tricky spellings, hyphens, numbers, and anything that needs explaining out loud. The same tests apply.
Ignore the upsells. You do not need fourteen extensions, and you do not need .biz, .info or a novelty ending unless it genuinely suits you.
What it should cost
Broadly £8 to £20 a year for a .co.uk or .com from a mainstream registrar. Anything much above that is paying for bundling you probably do not need.
Check the renewal price, not the first-year price. The single most common trap: a first year at £1 that renews at £40. It is not hidden, but it is not prominent either, and the renewal is what you actually pay for the next decade.
A domain someone already owns and wants to sell is a different market entirely, and prices there are whatever the owner thinks. For most small businesses the answer is to pick a different name rather than pay.
The three traps
1. It must be registered in your name
The one that ruins people. If your developer, your cousin or an agency registers it "for you" in their own name, they own it — and businesses do get held hostage by a domain after a relationship sours.
Buy it yourself, on your own account, with your own card and email. Let others manage it if you like, but the registrant must be you. If someone has already done this on your behalf, ask to be made the registrant now, while everyone is still friendly. This is the first of the four contract questions.
2. Losing it to an expiry nobody saw
Domains expire. When one does, the website and every email address on it stop, usually at the worst moment, and recovering it can be expensive or impossible if someone else registers it.
Two minutes of prevention: turn on auto-renew, make sure the card on file is current, and make sure the renewal notices go to an email address you actually read — not one on the domain that is about to expire, which is a real and circular way people lose them.
3. Your details being public
Domain registration requires a name, address and phone number. That is the registry's requirement of everyone, not a quirk of your registrar. For .co.uk, individuals not trading can usually opt to hide the address; most registrars also offer privacy on .com.
Worth a moment's thought if you work from home, because the alternative is your home address being publicly queryable.
What to do once you have it
- Turn on auto-renew and check the renewal price.
- Set up email on it. A few pounds a month, and an address at your own domain reads as a real business in a way a free one does not. This alone justifies the purchase.
- Point it at your site, or a holding page if there is no site yet. An unused domain showing a registrar's advert page is worse than nothing.
- Decide on www. Pick one form, and make the other redirect to it rather than both answering separately — otherwise you have two versions of every page.
- Write down where it is registered and how to log in, somewhere you will find it in three years. People genuinely forget which registrar holds their domain.
If you are changing to a new one
Moving a domain is fine; moving a website to a different address is where the traffic goes missing. Every old page needs to redirect permanently to its new equivalent, one to one, and that step is what quietly costs most migrations their search visibility. What goes wrong.
Keep the old domain registered and redirecting for years, not months. It is cheap, and links pointing at it keep arriving long after you have forgotten it existed.
How Soclo approaches it
Soclo gives every site a web address at soclo.site. If the option is switched on for your account, a panel called "Your own web address" lets you buy a domain or connect one you already own. Registering any domain asks for your name, address and phone — the registry requires that of everyone, and the app says which parts are theirs rather than ours.
Read the publishing guide →The bottom line
Ten minutes and roughly £8 to £20 a year. Match your business name, prefer .co.uk or .com, and ignore the upsells. Check the renewal price rather than the first-year offer. Then the three that matter: register it in your own name, turn on auto-renew with a card and contact address that still work, and think about whether your home address should be public. See also what a small business website should include.