Your church is your community, your family, your closest friends- all in one. One great thing about your church is that new people are always joining! That means new people to know, befriend and serve. It also means that it’s imperative that your location on the internet is easy to find, easy to remember, and easy to use. Information sharing can be a challenge when so many families and age groups attend from all over town.
Phone numbers and addresses are great on promotional materials or invitations, but you know that these days people rarely rely on print media to look for a place of worship. Going the extra mile to purchase a church domain name is important for many reasons. Here are a few:
Reasons to Purchase a Domain Name
- If you don’t grab it, someone else will. Buying up domain names is something of a hobby for those who stay on top of such developments, and it can be hugely profitable. The common and desirable domain names “Saved.org” or “bless.org” recently went up for auction starting at $8000.00.
- Having church domain names that are unadulterated with numbers, dashes or other extra fluff sets them apart as the first and best in a given domain category. For example, “bookstore.com” has much higher prestige than “bookstore123abc-xyz.com.” The longer you wait to purchase a domain name, the fewer pure domains there are.
- Churches often have so many well-loved traditions and ways of communicating, but they aren’t always efficient or seen as useful by newer visitors or new generations of believers. Having a relevant web domain shows that the church is not completely behind the times! In fact, there’s an increasingly universal expectation that any public organization should accomplish basic communication online. When that doesn’t happen, visitors are taken aback!
- Owning any form of a domain name or extension prevents others from swooping in to hijack church domain names for their own purposes like setting up competition for the domain among groups that want it, or using it to publish satire or degrading material.
Helpful Hints for Choosing a Domain Name
As you brainstorm ideas for possible church domain names, make sure its’ easy to remember. Using your entire moniker in a web address can be unwieldy and hard to remember. Our brains have a difficult time recognizing individual words are squashed together with no spaces.
Now that the “.church” domain extension is available, new possibilities have arisen. No longer are we all competing for the same “.com” or “.org” extensions. As we’ve mentioned, those customary configurations, while still more memorable than most, are on the way out. Seriously consider using the new “.church” extension as an alternative to .com, .org, or .net.
Test drive your domain name idea before buying it. If your name is Bethlehem United Methodist Church and you attach a nice little welcome to your domain name, make sure it’s not “bumcenterhere” or something equally silly. Salem United Methodist? Don’t wonder why you have so many visitors in the fall asking where the flowers are when your domain name is salemum.org. St. Andrew of Upper Providence should be careful not to alienate someone with “standrewup.org”
Make it easy to say aloud with a minimum of sound-alike letters like “b” and “v” or “d” and “b” so that when word spreads verbally your name can be easily shared. Spelling might also be an issue when people are passing along your website’s URL. “Arminian” and “Armenian” while theologically distinct may be difficult to spell when typing into a browser.
Make your domain name friendly to Googling. Unless your demographic is mostly people born before 1960, you already know that new people no longer find a church by flipping through the yellow pages. Do a quick search for churches in your locality and notice what the top returns have in common. Many of them will have some form of the municipality or neighborhood integrated into the domain.
Your Domain Pick.com
Check your church domain namesavailability now! Your Domain Pick is here to help you through every step. Start with a search to see if your first choice is still available. Click in the search box above and type it in!