If you want to have a website, the first thing you need to do is to buy a domain name. A domain name is the URL / address of your website that internet users type in the browser bar to visit your website. It may be your company name followed by .co.uk or .com for example. There are a huge number of different domain extensions that you can choose from, and some companies decide to buy as many of them as possible, even if they don’t use them all, so none of their competitors can have them. You can point several domains across to one website so that if someone types them in they will automatically be redirected to your site, but you don’t want to do this for too many.

When buying a domain name, you need to ensure that it is relevant to your business and ideally easy to type and remember. Avoid using words that are commonly misspelt or that are too long and try and think about if the company is likely to expand, whether the name used will still be fit for purpose as otherwise you could find that your site outgrows your domain and you need to migrate it across to another, which may cause you issues when it comes to SEO.