Why your website should live on a domain you own

A domain is the address people type, the address that goes on the van, and the only component of your web presence that you can take with you when everything else changes. It is also the cheapest thing in the entire stack. This is why it matters more than it looks, and how to get it right.

The case, in one story

Google used to generate free websites from Business Profiles. They lived on addresses ending in business.site. In March 2024 Google switched the product off; by June the old addresses returned errors. Owners who had connected their own domain moved it somewhere else and carried on. Owners on the free address lost the address itself — every card, listing and link that pointed at it, all at once. Not because they had done anything wrong, but because the address was never theirs. (The full account is in what happened to the free Business Profile websites.)

That is the whole argument. A domain converts your website provider from a landlord into a supplier.

What it costs

A .com or a country domain is typically the price of a couple of coffees per year. Registrars discount the first year and charge the standard rate afterwards, so look at the renewal price rather than the headline. Two things are worth having and are usually included: auto-renew, so a lapse cannot happen quietly, and privacy protection, so your home address is not published in a public register.

Choosing one

• Your business name first. People search for you by name, and matching what is on your signage removes any doubt they have found the right business.
• Short, and sayable down a phone. If you cannot read it aloud without spelling it, it is wrong.
• Avoid hyphens and creative spelling. Both get mistyped, and a mistyped domain is a customer who never arrives.
• A local extension is fine. .co.uk, .in, .com.au and their equivalents read as local rather than second-best.
• Do not stuff it with keywords. plumber-cheap-london-24hr.com does not rank better and does not read like a business.

www or not

Either works. What matters is that you pick one and the other redirects to it, so there is a single address rather than two versions of the same site competing. Link the one that loads directly wherever you publish your address, including the website field on your Business Profile.

Connecting it

Connecting a domain means changing two DNS records at your registrar so the address points at your site's host, then waiting — usually minutes, occasionally a few hours, because the change has to propagate. Your provider gives you the exact values.

On Pagebuilder this is in the dashboard under Domain: add the domain, copy the records it shows you, paste them at your registrar, and the certificate is issued automatically once it can see them. Your Pagebuilder address keeps working alongside it, so nothing breaks in the meantime.

What to update once it is live

A new address needs to replace the old one everywhere, or you end up maintaining two:

• The website field on your Google Business Profile
• Social bios
• Directory and trade-body listings
• Email signature — and consider moving email to the domain too, so you write from name@yourbusiness.com rather than a generic mailbox
• Invoices, quotes and printed material as they are reprinted
• Google Search Console, so you keep seeing what is indexed

The part people regret skipping

Set a calendar reminder for the renewal date, separately from auto-renew. Cards expire, and the way most people discover an expired domain is that the site is gone. It is the one failure in this whole list that is genuinely hard to undo.

If you have not built the site yet, the domain is still the right first purchase — build the site from your Google profile and point the domain at it when you are ready.