Choosing a domain for a side project
Which TLD, what a .co.uk actually costs you in search, and why the availability checkers lie.
You'll spend 3 hours on this and it matters less than you think. But a few of the decisions are hard to undo, so here's which ones.
The checkers lie about .co.uk
Start here because it wastes the most time.
Type a .co.uk into most registrar search boxes and you'll get "available" for domains that are very much taken. The registrar is guessing, or it's showing you a domain someone is parking that they'll happily broker at 40 times the price.
Check the registry directly:
whois -h whois.nic.uk example.co.uk
If it comes back with a registrant and dates, it's taken, whatever the shiny green tick said. For .com and most others, whois example.com is fine.
Do this before you get attached to a name.
Which extension
.com if you can get it at list price. Still the default people type, still the one that gets said out loud correctly.
.co.uk if your thing is UK-specific. It's a mild positive signal for UK searches, it's cheap (about £10 a year), and it tells a UK visitor the prices will be in pounds. Genuinely the right answer for anything local, legal, or tax-related.
.dev, .app, .io for developer tools. No search penalty. .dev and .app force HTTPS at the browser level, which is fine because you were going to use HTTPS anyway.
.ai if you want to pay £70 a year to look current for 18 months. Your call.
There's no ranking advantage in any of them beyond the country-code signal. A .xyz will rank perfectly well. The choice is about what people trust when they see it in a search result.
What actually matters
Short enough to say on a phone call. If you have to spell it twice, it's wrong.
No hyphens. Nobody remembers where the hyphen goes, and they read as spammy.
No numbers unless the number is the point. "4" and "for" being the same sound is a lifetime of confusion.
Check it's not already a brand. Search the name in quotes. If someone's selling something under it, pick again. A trademark dispute over a side project is the worst possible use of a weekend.
Say it out loud. Some names have an unfortunate second reading you won't notice on screen. This is a real and recurring problem, and reading it aloud once catches it.
Exact match domains
Buying bestlondonplumbers.co.uk because that's the search term does almost nothing now. Google stopped treating exact match as a strong signal over a decade ago.
It's not actively harmful, and it does help a little with click-through when your domain matches the query. But it's not worth picking a worse name for, and a keyword-stuffed domain caps how far the brand can grow.
Where to buy it
Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost with no markup on renewal, which is the bit that catches people. The £1 first year offers elsewhere renew at £30.
Cloudflare doesn't sell every TLD though, so for .co.uk you'll want a UK registrar. Whichever you pick, check the renewal price before the first-year price.
Turn on auto-renew. Then turn on the registrar's expiry emails to an address you actually read. Losing a domain to a lapsed card while you're on holiday is a well-trodden path.
Move DNS to Cloudflare regardless
Even if you bought it elsewhere. Free, fast, and it gives you a place to put records without waiting for a slow registrar panel.
Pointing it at Vercel afterwards:
vercel domains add yourdomain.com
Vercel tells you the records. Add them in Cloudflare, set the proxy to DNS-only for the verification, and it's live in a few minutes.
Buy one domain
The instinct is to buy the .com, the .co.uk, and 3 misspellings "to protect the brand". You have no brand. You have a weekend project.
Buy one. If the thing works, the others will still be there and you'll be able to afford them.