Why Do You Need a Domain? (9 reasons)

A domain name is the first thing you need to have if you want to build your own website.

Here are the 9 most important reasons why you need a domain name:

1.)Looks more professional in the eyes of your customers.

2.)You can create business emails (@buycompanyname.com) instead of using personal ones like @gmail.com.

3.)You can create more effective online marketing and advertising campaigns.

4.)Attract new customers that it is harder to find you offline.

5.)You can re-sell your domain later with good profit if things go wrong.

6.)Prevent other competitors to get the domain you want.

7.)If you are a blogger you can monetize easier and earn money from ads.

8.)If you are a retailer the trend is more and more people to buy online.

9.)If you are unhappy with your hosting company you can easily switch.

It means that you have bought the right to use a certain string of characters for your website URL or/and email address. For example for my website, the domain name is “buycompanyname.com”. No one else can use this exact combination of characters for his website. He can use some other combination like “ibuycompanyname.com”.

You can’t own a domain name forever and you need to renew per certain terms (1-10 years).In reality, you can keep having the domain name for decades if you are careful with the expiration date or set your domain in auto-renewal mode.

A domain name is a human-friendly address that is associated with an IP address. Computers communicate and identify each other with those long IP addresses (numbers) but for the human mind is much more difficult to memorize big numbers compared with words.

In short, domain names are needed so they can make our navigation on the web easier. When we type a domain name in our browser there is a system in place that redirects us to the correct IP address (another computer) where all the files of a website are stored and we can view it in our browser.

Typically it is not necessary to buy a domain name since you can use subdomains of bigger websites such as .wordpress.com or .blogger.com. On the other hand, if you are a legit company or a successful blogger it is the best practice to buy a domain name.

Unless you are getting a premium domain the cost should be very low around 10$-14$ so it isn’t so expensive to actually get a domain name.

Let’s examine now in detail the reasons I mentioned earlier for the need of having your own domain name:

Having a website makes you look more trusty and reliable. Of course, you can build a site by using a free subdomain like mybobssite123.wordpress.com but how professional looks that site for the rest of the people? Having your own domain name gives more trustworthiness to your site overall. Just think how many well-known companies use their own domain instead of a free subdomain like wix.com, .blogger.com or wordpress.com.

The cost of buying a domain name is much less compared with the loss of reliability because you are using a free subdomain instead.

Everyone can have a free personal email and that’s why a lot of spammers use them to send massive emails. When you use a business email immediately the receiver considers it as more serious and there are more chances to actually read it. A business email is usually associated with a real company and it adds up to your overall credibility.

Even when you give your business card to someone, it seems much better to use a business email compared with some personal email. People immediately think that you are running a serious company or you are working for a big corporation.

When you create an advertising campaign with Google Adwords or Facebook ads you need to redirect the customers to a website for the final purchase or for finding more for your business. Again as we mentioned earlier, having a unique domain will be an advantage since potential customers will trust more this kind of website for their purchases or the info they provide.

If you are a small business you rely mostly on local clients (for example if you are a dentist or a restaurant). When you have an online presence people from different areas can find you and learn more for your product or services.

Search engines like google trying to match queries from users with the best results. There is a chance that your site can be the answer to their queries if they seek for some specific service or product.

Believe it or not, there is a big demand for good domain names. If your domain contains some good keywords or receives a decent amount of traffic there is a big chance that it has a value for another person. If for any reason your business isn’t successful you can consider the domain name as an additional asset that you can get some good value from it.

There are cases that competitors have similar names or they want to use some catchy keywords in their domain. If you move fast you can get the good domain before them and have an advantage in the online world that can be translated to real value.

You will also protect your brand name better if you own a domain with your company’s name or you will be associated with a keyword-rich domain that is directly connected with your industry.

When you use a free subdomain like blogger.com or wordpress.com you are missing a big chance of getting good money from ads. The premium ad brokers and even the medium or big companies that spend a lot of money on advertising, they will not put ads on websites built on free subdomains.

The minimum requirement would be to have owned your domain and have good web traffic.

Customers trust the web more for online purchases but giving their card details on a website that doesn’t have a unique domain looks spammy at least. So don’t miss potential customers just because you don’t own a unique domain.

For a website, you need 2 things a domain name and a place to host the files of the website (usually provided by a hosting company). If you own the domain and you are unhappy with your hosting provider you can easily switch to another. If you are using a free subdomain you don’t have the freedom to choose where you are hosting your files, text, videos, etc. and if you start receiving a lot of traffic your website in a free subdomain will become very slow.

There are some cases when you don’t need actually to get a domain name. For example, if you are blogging just for hobby and you write posts rarely there is no need to buy a domain name.

If you just do experiments on the web and you just want to check how it looks like to have your own website then there is no need to have a custom domain.

In short, if you don’t seek any profit from your online activity you don’t need to make this kind of investment.