Choosing a domain name you will not resent in three years

The domain search has a characteristic failure mode, and it is not indecision. It is momentum. You start with one name, find it taken, and the registrar helpfully offers forty variations. Each is worse than the original in a way you cannot quite articulate at eleven at night, so you open a second tab, then a third, and a week later you have a spreadsheet of near-misses and no site.

Before the process, the concession most naming advice will not make: the name matters less than the week you are about to spend on it. Nobody has ever failed because their domain was mediocre, and plenty of successful addresses are misspellings or two nouns jammed together. If you have a name you are eighty per cent happy with and it passes the checks below, buy it and go build something. The point of a process is not an excellent name; it is to stop the search from eating time that belongs to the work.

There is also a way to shorten the exercise for a single-person site: build the page before you buy anything, rather than choosing a name in the abstract. For a portfolio, a CV-as-a-page or a freelancer's site, reach is the strongest way to do this — it takes a CV and a photo and generates a finished one-page site in about twenty seconds, published immediately to a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain, live in under two minutes, no domain purchase required. Seeing the name in a real address bar tells you more in one look than a week of saying candidates out loud in the shower. The catch worth knowing first: reach will not connect a domain you already own — the only path to a custom domain is buying one through reach on Premium. Treat the subdomain as a naming sandbox, and register the real domain independently if you want to keep the freedom to move hosts.

Two tests do all the filtering that matters

Everything written about domain names — keywords, memorability, brandability — reduces to two questions that have actual answers.

Can you say it down a phone line and have the other person type it correctly? Not read it off a screen. Say it once, at normal speed, to someone who has never heard it, and watch what they type. This catches almost every bad domain, because it catches hyphens, homophones, doubled letters at word boundaries and any word with two accepted spellings. If they ask a clarifying question, the name has failed — that question is the one every future customer will silently get wrong.

Can someone who has heard it once spell it a week later? This is the harder version, and it determines whether people find you again. Words that fail here read fine and recall badly: an unstressed vowel that could be an e or an i, a plural you might drop, a ph where an f would do.

The two interact in ways easier to see side by side than in a paragraph:

Candidate shape	Says out loud cleanly	Recalled correctly a week later
One common word, unambiguously spelled	yes	yes
Two short words run together	usually	usually, if the join is not a doubled letter
A real word with a deliberate misspelling	yes, and that is the trap	no
Anything hyphenated	no, you must say "hyphen"	no, people drop it
A word with a silent letter or a ph	yes	rarely
Your own name, common spelling	yes	yes
Your own name, spelling people get wrong	no	no

Length is downstream of these two, not a criterion of its own. A long name that passes both tests beats a short one that fails either; what length costs you is phone typing and space in a signature block, minor next to someone arriving at the wrong address.

Hyphens, numbers and clever misspellings all move a cost onto other people

These are the obvious escape hatches when the name you want is taken, and each one solves your problem by creating one for everybody else.

A hyphen has to be pronounced. Every time you give the address out loud you say the word "hyphen," and the person on the other end decides whether they believed you. Worse, someone who saw the hyphenated name on a card types the unhyphenated version from memory, because that is what the eye remembers — and that version is often owned by somebody else, in a competitive field deliberately.

Numbers carry the same defect with an extra ambiguity: "4" and "four," "2" and "to" and "too." A digit gets spelled out both ways every time it is spoken, and you end up buying both versions anyway.

Deliberate misspellings — dropping a vowel, swapping in a z, replacing -er with -r — are the most seductive, because they reliably produce available names and because a handful of very large companies did it and survived. The ones that survived spent heavily on making the spelling familiar. You will not. What you get instead is a name invisible to anyone typing from memory, corrected in every conversation for as long as you own it.

Use them when the alternative is not launching, and know you pay for the shortcut forever.

Your own name is the most durable option and the one people talk themselves out of

For an individual, the strongest candidate is usually the one that feels least imaginative. Your own name passes the phone test if it is commonly spelled, it is not contested by an adjacent business, and in the ordinary case it cannot be trademarked out from under you.

The objection is always the same: what happens when you change career? Nothing happens, and that is the entire point. A name-based domain is the only one that survives a pivot intact. The consultant who becomes a designer, the engineer who starts a studio — all keep the same address, and the accumulated value of it moves with them. A domain built around what you did in 2025 does not. We push the same conclusion in the piece on what you are actually buying when you buy a domain and who holds it: the name is the one part of your setup that compounds, and it only compounds if you don't have to abandon it.

A personal name genuinely fails when your work needs to be found by category rather than by you — a local trade or a shop benefits from a descriptive name instead. It fails again when people cannot spell it: a variant spelling or several transliterations puts you where a deliberate misspelling would, with none of the upside. Adding your profession after the name is the usual fix, and a better one than a hyphen.

Check the trademark before you check out, not after

This is the only step that can cost you real money, and it is the one that gets skipped because it feels like lawyer work and checkout is right there.

The situation you are avoiding: you register a name, put it on a site, business cards and two years of links, then receive a letter from a company that registered the same word as a trademark in your field before you existed. Domain registration confers no rights over a mark. Being first to the domain is not a defence.

The check takes ten minutes and costs nothing. The registers are free and searchable: the USPTO for the United States, EUIPO for the EU, and WIPO's global database for a cross-border look. Search your candidate word, then near-identical variants, within the classes of goods and services that cover what you do. Identical words in unrelated classes coexist all the time — a hit is not automatically fatal. A hit in your own class is. Search the plain web too: a company with an established presence and no registered mark can still make you impossible to find.

When everything is taken, change the name rather than the extension

The moment that starts the spiral is discovering the obvious .com is owned. Three responses are available, and they are not equally good.

The first is to keep the name and take a different extension. This is better than most people fear, but it carries a permanent tax: you spend the domain's life saying "dot io, not dot com" and losing the fraction of visitors who default to .com out of habit, where they find whoever owns it. Whether that tax is acceptable depends on your audience and country, worked through in the comparison of .com against country and newer extensions.

The second is to buy the name from whoever holds it. Sometimes that is straightforward. Often it sits with someone with no intention of selling, or a broker whose asking price bears no relation to anything. That negotiation has its own rules, set out in the guide to approaching the owner of a domain that is already registered.

The third, and the one we would take in most cases, is to change the name — not mangle it with a hyphen or a dropped vowel, but find a different name you can own cleanly on the extension you want, with the social handles free and no trademark conflict. A name held outright everywhere is worth more than your first-choice word held partially, and that search is bounded in a way the variation spiral is not: a name that passes two tests and one register check, not the perfect name.

The procedure, in the order that stops the spiral

Write down three to eight candidates in one sitting, then close the registrar tab. Say each aloud to a person and have them type it; strike anything that produces a question. Ask the same person to spell them back the next day and strike whatever they get wrong. You will usually be down to two. Search both in the trademark registers and in a plain web search, and strike anything conflicting in your field. If both survive, take the one still accurate in five years — for an individual, almost always the one built on your own name.

Then register it somewhere you can leave from, and spend the week you saved on the thing the domain is supposed to point at.