How to pick a domain name for your Australian business

Your domain name ends up on invoices, the side of the van, your email signature and every business card you hand out. Changing it later means reprinting all of that and telling every customer, so it pays to get it right the first time.

For most Australian businesses the first choice is .com.au. Customers read it as local, and plenty of them type it out of habit when they are looking for someone nearby.

A .com.au name has eligibility rules. You need an Australian presence, which usually means an ABN, an ACN, a registered business name or an Australian trade mark, and the name has to be closely connected to you: your business name, your trading name, or what you sell or do. Picture a bakery in Ballarat called Crumb and Co. It could hold crumbandco.com.au, and it could reasonably hold ballaratsourdough.com.au as well, because that describes what it sells.

There is also the shorter .au ending, so the bakery could hold crumbandco.au alongside the .com.au. These still need an Australian presence. Some businesses take both versions of their name simply so nobody else gets the one they passed on.

Then .com, which is open to anyone, anywhere. It makes sense if you sell overseas or plan to. If your customers are mostly here, .com.au is usually the better fit.

What makes a good one

Say it out loud as if you were giving it to someone over the phone. If you catch yourself adding "that's with two Ls" or "the number four, not the word", keep thinking.

Short beats clever. Hyphens get forgotten, and the customer who forgets yours ends up on someone else's site. Spellings like "kwik" or "4u" look fine on a sign and fall apart the moment someone has to type them from memory. Write the whole thing out as one string of lowercase letters, too. Words that run together can spell something you never meant.

If your exact business name is taken, adding your town or your trade is often clearer than a shortened version nobody could guess. Crumbandcobakery.com.au is longer than crumbco.com.au but far easier to remember.

Whatever you choose, register the domain in your business's own name, with your own details as the contacts. A web designer or a helpful friend often registers it for you, and most of them do the right thing. The trouble comes years later, when that person has moved on, the login is lost and nobody can prove who the domain belongs to. Untangling that is slow and stressful while your website and email depend on it.

Two settings save a surprising amount of grief. Auto renew stops the domain quietly expiring because a card changed or a reminder landed in spam. And a current contact email means renewal and security notices reach you, not a former staff member or an old internet provider.

One more thing that confuses people. Owning the domain does not give you a website. The domain is the address people type in, and hosting is where the website and your email actually live. They are separate things, bought separately.

Registering and managing it with us

We register .com.au, .au and .com names. When you have a name in mind, search for it on our domains page, choose the endings you want, and enter the business details the domain will be held under, such as your ABN or ACN for a .com.au. Once you pay, the domain is registered in your business's name.

If you already hold a domain somewhere else, we can transfer it to us as well, so your names sit together.

After that everything is in your Registry dashboard: your domains, their renewal dates and auto renew. Hosting lives there too if you add it. Our web hosting runs on Australian servers with cPanel and email, on quarterly or yearly plans, so a site and mailboxes on your new domain can be set up when you are ready.

If you are unsure which ending you are eligible for, or whether a name you want is tied up somewhere, our team can check on 1300 070 000, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm Melbourne time.