Most advice about choosing a domain name is about creativity. That is the easy part, and it is not what causes regret two years later. What causes regret is a name that people cannot spell over the phone, cannot type without a hyphen, or cannot use because somebody else owns the trademark.
These are the constraints worth applying, roughly in the order that they eliminate candidates.
1. It has to survive being said out loud
The strongest test of a domain name costs nothing: say it to somebody and ask them to type it. Not spell it — type it. Everything that goes wrong at this step is a permanent tax on every conversation you ever have about your business.
Three specific failures come up repeatedly:
Homophones. site and sight, for and four, to, too and two. If your name contains one, you will spell it every single time, forever.
Doubled letters at word boundaries. bookkeeper is fine as a word. mybook-keeper and mybookkeeper are two plausible spellings of the same spoken name, and you will lose traffic to whichever one you did not buy.
Words with two accepted spellings. Colour and color, grey and gray, theatre and theater. Buying both is the usual answer, and that is a recurring cost rather than a one-off.
If the name passes the say-it-out-loud test, it has cleared the hurdle that eliminates most clever names.
2. Shorter is better, but not at the cost of clarity
A domain can technically be up to 63 characters per label, so the limit is never the constraint — readability is. The rough working ranges:
- Under 10 characters. Excellent, and almost entirely unavailable in
.comunless it is invented. - 10 to 15 characters. The realistic target for a real business name.
- 15 to 25 characters. Fine if it is two or three clear words that read instantly.
- Over 25 characters. It will be shortened, mistyped, or replaced with a link, so the name stops doing its job.
Do not shorten by removing vowels or using text-speak. flwrshp.com is shorter than flowershop.com and worse at everything a domain name is for.
3. Hyphens: the short answer is no
This comes up constantly, so it is worth being direct about it.
Hyphens do not hurt your SEO. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and there is no ranking penalty. Anyone telling you otherwise is repeating advice that was never true.
Hyphens hurt everything else. Nobody says the hyphen out loud, so every verbal mention becomes ambiguous. People forget it when typing. And the unhyphenated version of your name almost certainly belongs to somebody else — which means you have chosen to send a portion of your own traffic to a competitor permanently.
The one defensible case is when the unhyphenated form reads as a different word. expertsexchange.com is the canonical example of why that check matters. Run your candidate together, in lowercase, and read it fresh.
Numbers have the same problem in a sharper form: 4 and four are two names, and you need both.
4. Check the trademark before you check availability
This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the only one on this list that can cost you the domain after you have built on it.
A domain being available to register says nothing about whether you are allowed to use it. Registrars do not check trademarks. If your name is confusingly similar to an existing mark in your industry, the owner can file a UDRP complaint and take the domain, regardless of the fact that you paid for it and registered first.
Search the free trademark databases for your jurisdiction before buying — the UKIPO, the EUIPO, or the USPTO's TESS. You are looking for marks in your own industry class; an identical word in an unrelated sector is usually fine, which is why Apple exists as both a record label and a computer company.
If your candidate is a made-up word, this risk drops close to zero, which is one of the underrated arguments for invented names.
5. Decide the extension deliberately
.com remains the default assumption. When somebody remembers your name and types it without thinking, they type .com, and that habit is the entire argument.
That said, it is a default rather than a rule, and there are real cases for .io, .co, .org and country extensions. The trade-offs are specific enough to deserve their own treatment — see .com vs .net vs .org for which one fits your situation.
One rule holds across all of them: if you pick a non-.com extension and the .com of your exact name is owned by an active business, expect to lose a steady trickle of traffic and email to them permanently.
6. Check what the name did before you
Domains get reused. A name that was previously a spam operation, a link farm or an adult site can carry consequences into your ownership: existing search penalties, blocklisted mail delivery, and inbound links you did not ask for.
Two checks, both free and quick:
- The Wayback Machine. Enter the domain and look at what it hosted historically. An empty history is a good sign; five years of pharmaceutical spam is not.
- The registration date. Run the name through the WHOIS Lookup. A creation date decades ago on a name you assumed was fresh means it has a history worth reading before you commit.
This matters most for expired domains bought for their age, which is precisely the situation where people skip the check.
7. Confirm the price you will actually pay
The advertised price is the first year. The renewal is a different number, sometimes ten times higher, and it is the one you pay for the rest of the domain's life. This trips up more people than any other item on this list — see why domain renewal costs more.
The two tests nobody runs
Almost everyone checks availability. Almost nobody runs these two, and both take under a minute.
The radio test. Say only the domain name, once, at conversational speed, to somebody who has not seen it written. Ask them to type it. If it lands, the name works.
The email test. Say the name as an email address out loud: "it's hello at yourname dot com". Names that read fine on a page frequently collapse here, because the extra syllables around them expose every ambiguity.
Generating candidates
Once the constraints are clear, the bottleneck is volume: you need a lot of candidates because most of the good short ones are taken.
The Domain Name Generator produces brandable candidates from a keyword or description and checks real availability across .com, .net, .io and .co as it goes, so what you see is what you can actually register — not a list you then have to check one at a time.
Run the shortlist through the tests above before you buy any of them. The generator can tell you a name is available. It cannot tell you whether your mother could spell it.