Which Domain Extension to Choose?

A domain extension can be used when taking into account: the price, availability or use of the website. To know which domain extension to choose from among the several that are available, consider your target audience, which makes country code extension useful when aiming at country level audiences while generic domain work best for easy to remember and commonly used extensions.

A. Generic Domain Extensions

These are the most used and the ones we can say are the most advisable in most cases. Options like .com, .org or .net are very popular all over the world. They are meant to offer something to everyone, no matter what country the visitors come from. They are generally the first option to consider.

This is interesting, for example, for a news page, an online store where we are going to place international orders, etc. The .com option is undoubtedly the most used. At first it was oriented to commerce, but today we can find pages of all kinds that have this extension. There are less and less free.

The .net option was network oriented and has also become a really popular option when a user is going to create a page. However, it is still more oriented for those pages that are related to technology, Internet and networks. It could be interesting for example if we are going to create a page for the sale of network devices.

Regarding .org , it is more advisable for non-profit entities. It is not the best option for a private company. For example, it would be useful for an association or organization in which there are no commercial purposes. However, it is another of the most used worldwide in very diverse sectors.

B. Country Code Extensions

They are also widely used. However, in this case we are faced with limitations . Although it depends on the country, in many cases they do not allow anyone to register a domain with that extension. There are well-known cases in which it does, like the .tv extension that belongs to Tuvalu, a small country that undoubtedly found a huge economic resource thanks to the Internet.

Here we can name the extension .es , which corresponds to Spain, as one of the most important options. It is widely used by national companies, services oriented to a local public. An example would be an online store that only sends orders within Spain. Also some news page where they only pretend to have a national audience.

Therefore, in this case we could say that it would be more suitable for pages that belong to a specific country and want to focus their audience there. However, search engines do not penalize this type of extensions compared to generic ones.

Yes, there are cases in which it would be interesting to choose one in particular. Once again we return to the example of .tv, which is a widely used extension for pages related to television. Also when we want our page to be better positioned in a certain nation or even have different extensions, beyond the only one in our country.

C. Activity Extensions

They are not the most practical option, since they are more unknown extensions and may not even give a good image to a web page. However, we can take them into account on certain occasions for specific activities. They are an alternative to classic extensions such as generic or country extensions, which are actually the most used.

There are extensions like .travel, .club, .cloud … that could be used for pages related to travel, a sports club or the cloud, for example. There are many more and we have only shown a few examples. Although it is not the one that we should take into account the most, it is also one more alternative. They are basically used for certain activities and sectors in which it may be interesting to have a more personalized extension, which can also serve as a guide for visitors who come to our site. It would not be the best idea for a more generic website, which does not focus only on a certain sector.

In short, these are some of the options we have to create a web domain and have an extension. They are different, but each of them can be interesting at specific times. Of course, we also have the option of having several extensions and redirecting the traffic. As we can see, the domain name and extension that we choose will be very important for our website. It is essential to position the page, but also to attract visitors directly. It is something that we will have to think very well before finishing recording it and not regret it later. We can say that it is one of those vital steps in the creation of any website.

Tips to Choosing a Domain Name
  • Keep it short
  • Avoid hyphens
  • Avoid double consecutive letters (double letters)
  • Easy to spell and memorable
  • Consider using domain name as social media username

The biggest impact of a domain name extension you choose should reflect yourself or organization you’re setting it up for. The most common extension, the .com should be carefully used as it’s been overused and getting the right domain name to match the extension will be an uphill task.

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