How Can a Domain Name Impact Your Business?

Everyone knows what a website is, but the term domain can sound a bit more technical. Which part of your website address is a domain? How does it affect your business? And how are other businesses using them? Read our guide and findings from a study of over 3,000 businesses to avoid common mistakes and misconceptions.

What’s the difference between a domain and a website address?

A website address, also known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), consists of several key components that tell the browser how to locate and retrieve a specific resource on the internet. Let's break it down using the URL of the IKOL user dashboard as an example:

• Scheme (https://) - the initial part of the URL (before the colon :) that indicates how the resource should be accessed. For websites the scheme uses a protocol, it’s either HTTP or HTTPS.

• Subdomain (business.) - a prefix added to a domain name to separate a section of a website.

• Root domain (ikol.com) - a human-readable address for the website, the part you can register. The domain name is made up of:

  • SLD, or Second-Level Domain (ikol) - the specific identifier for the website

  • TLD, or Top-Level Domain (.com) - domain suffix that helps classify websites based on purpose, type, or geographic location

• Path (/dashboard) - the part that comes after the domain name, showing where exactly to find a specific page or file on a website

As you can see, the domain is only a part of the website address. Now that we’ve clarified the definitions, we can dive deeper into best practices for domain names and take a closer look at the findings from our business website research.

How should I name my domain?

The domain name plays a significant role in the effectiveness of your business’s online presence. It impacts various areas, including brand recognition, search engine visibility, and marketing potential.

So, what should you consider when choosing a domain name? We'll analyze domain names in terms of:

• Matching your business name
• Length and memorability
• Readability and the use of hyphens

Match the domain with your business name

As a rule, the domain name should match your business name. Our website is an example of this rule in practice: our company is called IKOL, and our domain is ikol.com. However, there are many cases where matching the domain name exactly with the business name isn't possible or advisable – for example, if the domain name is already taken, or if your business name is very long. In such cases, the best solution is a compromise between matching the business name and maintaining an appropriate domain length – which we discuss further in the next section.

Match between domain name and business name

As the research shows, more than one-third of businesses have a domain name that matches their business name exactly. Another 18.7% have shorter domain names than their business names – which is a great solution for companies with long legal names. Longer domain names than business names were found in 11.4% of cases – while lengthening a domain name is not a good strategy, sometimes it’s necessary, such as when the desired address is unavailable. Most commonly, businesses added their location or area of operation (e.g., exampleohio.com) or a wordplay (e.g., myexample.com or getexample.com).
What’s surprising is the number of businesses whose domain names did not reference their business names at all – a striking 35.2% of websites had no connection between the domain and business name! What do we mean by that? Let’s assume the business is called John Doe Roofing. If the domain name uses completely different words, like bestroof.com, there’s clearly no link to the brand. Even if the domain were roofingboston.com, it would still lack a meaningful connection to the brand because any company in the industry could use the word 'roofing.' In this case, the owner’s name is the brand and the brand is not referenced.

Domain length does matter

Regarding SLD (Second-Level Domain) length, the general rule is that the shorter, the better. While technically SLDs can be up to 63 characters long, it's generally recommended to keep them much, much shorter to ensure they are easy to remember, type, and use for branding.

In our business websites research we’ve used the following SLD length classification:

• Short – up to 16 characters (the recommended length)
• Medium – between 17 and 23 characters
• Long – 24 or more characters.

Average Second-Level Domain length

The research results don’t look good for businesses – only 11.1% of companies have an optimal domain length. Service businesses perform the worst, with 57.9% having long domain names. This could be due to the fact that service businesses tend to have the longest names on average (read more in our blog on company names). This illustrates that including your entire business name in the domain at all costs isn’t always the best approach.

Choose a clear and dash-free domain name

Domain readability is affected not only by length. Issues can also arise from using long, obscure, or difficult-to-spell words. Sometimes, word combinations can be read differently than intended – for example, itscrap.net could be interpreted as both “IT scrap" and “it’s crap". And that’s just one of many awkward and funny examples.

What if you separate the words with hyphens (commonly known as dashes) to avoid ambiguity? Generally, it’s recommended to avoid dashes. Users often forget hyphens, leading to errors and lost website traffic. Hyphens can also be problematic if you need to promote the domain verbally: your dash example dash domain dot com can be a mouthful.

Hyphens in business domain names

Our research shows that businesses generally avoid hyphens in their domain names, with only 8.8% using them. Some may have made this choice consciously, whether to improve readability or because the dash-free domain was unavailable. While using a hyphen in a domain name can sometimes be justified, this decision should always be carefully considered.

Which domain extension (TLD) should I choose?

When choosing a TLD (Top-Level Domain) for your website, consider a few key factors. The most popular and widely recognized TLD is .com, and it’s usually the best choice if available because users trust and expect it. In our research, 90.4% of businesses chose .com as their TLD. The second most popular TLD among the researched businesses was .net, used by 3.8% of companies.

Most popular Top-Level Domains among the researched companies

What other TLD options can you choose from? If you want to emphasize your business’s connection to a specific region, you can opt for a country-specific TLD (ccTLD). However, keep in mind that some ccTLDs may require meeting specific criteria for registration. For example, .us can only be registered by U.S. citizens, residents, or businesses registered in the U.S.

There are also some interesting examples of ccTLDs used globally without special registration requirements, such as:

• .me (Montenegro) – often used to create a play on words (e.g., message.me).
• .tv (Tuvalu) – commonly used by television networks, and .fm (Micronesia) – used by radio stations.
• .io (British Indian Ocean Territory) – popular among tech services due to the association with "input/output."

There’s also a vast pool of TLDs related to specific industries. While they don’t represent a significant percentage in our research, they become more relevant when looking at individual sectors – for example, 10% of solar panel businesses use the .solar TLD, and 5% of general contractors use .construction.

Do I need SSL for my domain?

You've probably encountered warnings when visiting websites that state the site is not secure. That feels a bit unsettling, right? This message appears when the SSL/TLS certificate is missing, expired, or misconfigured. TLS (Transport Layer Security), the successor to SSL, has been the primary protocol for securing websites since the late 1990s. In 2015, Google and other tech giants began pushing harder for websites to adopt HTTPS, encouraging better security practices. Now, if a site uses the HTTPS protocol, it means it has a valid SSL/TLS certificate. If it uses HTTP, it means the connection is not encrypted – in other words, the person managing the site forgot to renew the certificate.

According to our research, in 2024, 91.4% of business websites had an active SSL certificate.

Percentage of sites with and without a valid SSL certificate

Which industries did the worst job at keeping their certificates up to date? The lowest percentage of sites with active SSL certificates belonged to businesses in the traditional medicine sector – only 40%. Next were companies in the car audio industry, with 60% of sites having active SSL certificates. It's particularly surprising that businesses in IT development and computer repairs rank among the 10 industries with the lowest percentage of active SSL certificates, as they should be well aware of the importance of website security. Another unexpected result was the presence of private investigators and real estate agents in this group – industries where trust is crucial should not allow their security certificates to lapse, as this negatively impacts how professionally they are perceived.

10 industries with the lowest percentage of valid SSL certificates

Summary

So, what are our final tips and observations regarding business domain names?

• Find a good balance between the length of the domain, how well it matches your business name, and its readability.
• You can’t go wrong with a .com TLD, but also consider other TLDs that align with your business profile.
• Make sure your domain's SSL certificate is always active.

And that’s about it. If you’re looking for an even easier solution, visit our website generator and try out our domain name analyzer, which will suggest the best option for your business.

The data and statistics presented in this blog post come from a research study conducted by IKOL between 2023 and 2024. To learn more about IKOL research methodology and explore other findings, visit: ikol.com/research