Most of us want to have a really great domain name for our church’s main website and, if we have any, our microsites.
But these days it’s becoming really difficult to find good domain names that aren’t already registered by someone else. It’s nearly impossible to find a simple yourchurch.com domain, and the yourchurch.org domains seem to be disappearing, too. None of us want to resort to an absurdly long domain name like yourchurchyourtownSTATEdenomination.net, because no one is going to type that into a browser – at least not without at least one typo!
Thankfully, ICANN (the group that oversees the availability of domain names) has recently opened up a lot of new options by adding new top-level domains (TLDs) for us to use.
A TLD is the last part of a domain name – the “.com” or “.org” part of yourchurch.com. And they’ve released a slew of options, many of which work really well for churches. If you can’t find one of the standard domain names using your church’s name, there are a number of great options for you to choose from. I’ve compiled a list of options below that I think could work really well for some churches.
To find an available domain name for your church, just go to your domain registrar and search for your church name (or whatever domain you desire) with the TLDs from below. If you don't have a current registrar, I recommend Namecheap (affiliate link) – that's who I use for all of my domains, and I've always had an excellent experience with them. The registrar will guide you through the registration process.
Note: A few of these domains may be considered “premium” by some registrars, which means that they could be expensive to register. Sometimes that extra expense is just a one time fee – for example, it may cost $600 to register for the first year, but subsequent years renew at $13/month. At other times, the premium domains may be quite expensive every year. The details will depend on the registrar you choose and the way they designate premium domains.