CO.UK vs the .UK Which Domain Extension to choose to launch a Site in the UK

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Your Domain name is the first thing people notice and it is an important step about your online presence. There are more than 400 different extensions for a domain name. The name has to be related to your business and individuals should be able to easily remember the same also. Both the factors are equally important.

What is a Domain

A Domain Name represents one or more IP addresses. Most of the small companies will have a single IP address and a single domain name; whereas large corporate may have multiple IP addresses.

What a Domain Name is Note

Domain name is not a website and domain name need to be registered like xyz.co.uk. Once you register a domain name, you can use that name for your website, which needs to be designed and developed. The domain name is then associated with this website.

Importance of Your Domain Choice

Your Domain name is the first thing people notice and it is an important step about your online presence. There are more than 400 different extensions for a domain name. The name has to be related to your business and individuals should be able to easily remember the same also. Both the factors are equally important.

There are other factors to consider as well like the many categories of Top Level Domains (TLDs), Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and New Generic Top Level Domain (gTLDs).

With that introduction, let us see some common extensions people in the UK like to use. When you have a global business and your customers can be from anywhere in the world, you may generally like to have .com as your extension. The advantage of .com is it is considered as default domain extension and most web browsers will add .com if you don’t type any extension.

Location specific domain extensions are popular in all countries when the business is local to the country. The most common choice for UK businesses is .co.uk. There are industry specific domain names also but those are still niche.

Only in the case of an Organisation like a charitable trust or an informative website, people may choose to go for .org. Generic domain extensions also make it easy for people to remember rather than a different extension for every business or every domain name.

Country specific extensions have got some benefits on the SEO as one of the parameters but from your physical location, generally you will find the business results from the same country. In 2014, a top-level-domain (TLD) was added to the domain extensions in the UK called as .uk.

The .uk extension represents something new in the UK’s digital domain and new companies are getting this extension as compared to .co.uk. It shows you are new, you are advanced and you are connected to latest technology. It is interesting to know that 4 out of 5 people in the UK like to have the domain extension ending with .uk.

New Generic Top Level Domain (gTLDs)

domain extensions

There has been a huge move of new gTLDs in the last few years which has seen brands, companies and organisations snapping up the newly available domains. Check out some of the new TLDs below and there is a full list that gets updated regularly at ICANN with a list of the new gTLDs on their site.

.today .technology .tips .land .kitchen .contractors .diamonds .construction .church .club .clothing .camera .careers .directory .enterprises .guru .holdings .gallery .equipment .estate .bike .recipes .sexy .shoes .plumbing .photos .lighting .singles .tattoo .lawyer .voyage 

To Summarise

The extension depends on your purpose of being online. If you are a new business or start-up or an online business, you can go with .uk extension. If you are an established brand in UK selling your products and services in the UK market and need something trusted and well known, keep using .co.uk.

In case you are a global brand and are not having different country-specific web pages for each country, your best choice is .com. Alternatively, your corporate pages can have .com and your localised pages can have .co.uk or country specific domain extension. It is important to have this decision before the launch of your website or you need to keep diverting your traffic to a different domain name later.

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