Older advice on choosing a domain name in Canada tells you to fit keywords into it, to insist on the .com and to avoid hyphens. Only the last point still holds. Ownership of the domain causes more damage than any of them, and it gets far less attention.
Domains end up registered to a former employee or to an agency that has since closed. Then a renewal is missed or a transfer is needed, and the website and the email that run on that domain are both exposed. Treat ownership as a continuity question for the whole organization. It deserves more of your attention than the extension.
The seven decisions below are listed in the order you will meet them.
1. Decide between .ca and .com first
For a Canadian organization this is the extension question worth your time, and the answer depends on where your customers are.
Choose .ca when your market is Canadian. Canadians recognize it as local, and short, plain names are usually easier to find in .ca than in .com. Choose .com when a real share of your revenue comes from outside Canada. Registering both and pointing one at the other costs little, and it settles the question for good.
Keep in mind that .ca has eligibility rules. CIRA, the organization that runs the .ca registry, applies its Canadian Presence Requirements. The registrant has to fit one of its categories, such as a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident or a corporation incorporated in Canada. You pick the category when you register. CIRA audits registrations and can cancel a .ca whose holder does not qualify. If a contractor or an agency outside Canada handles the registration for you, make sure your organization is the one named as registrant.
CIRA does not sell names to the public, so you register a .ca through one of its certified registrars, listed on cira.ca. Any of them can tell you in seconds whether a name is free. Prices differ little from one registrar to the next, and losing the domain would cost far more, so compare the account controls covered in decisions 5 and 6. If you would like the domain kept with your hosting, our own hosting company, WPL Hosting, registers .ca, .com and .org names and takes transfers.
Quebec organizations can also register a .quebec name. It reads well locally and stands out. Use it alongside a .ca or .com rather than instead of one, because readers elsewhere in Canada will not expect it.
2. Optimize for saying it out loud
The useful test is whether someone can hear the name once, over the phone, and type it correctly.
Most of the classic mistakes fail that test. Nobody says the hyphens out loud. A listener can’t tell 7 from seven. Doubled letters where one word ends and the next begins get dropped, and so do spellings people would never guess. A name that sounds like an existing company fails as well, and it may also bring a trademark problem.
Read your shortlist aloud to someone who has not seen it written down, and ask them to spell it back.
3. Stop trying to put keywords in it
Exact-match domains lost most of their search value years ago, when Google released an update aimed at them. A name stuffed with keywords can now work against you, because visitors read it as a cheap site.
A name you can build a brand on is worth more than a descriptive one you will outgrow. Descriptive names tie you to one service, one city or one product line. Renaming a business later is expensive, and choosing well at the start costs almost nothing.
4. Check that the name is free to use
A registrar will sell you a domain that conflicts with someone else’s trademark. Owning the registration gives you no protection, and finding the conflict after the signs are printed is expensive.
Before you commit, search the Canadian Trademarks Database and your province’s business registry. Then search the name in Google and see who already ranks for it. If you operate in other countries, check there too. It takes about twenty minutes, and now and then it saves a year of trouble.
5. Register it in the organization’s name, not a person’s
Of the seven, this decision has the longest consequences.
The registrant on record should be your organization, at an address and phone number it controls. Use a shared address such as domains@yourcompany.ca as the administrative contact, so notices reach whoever holds the role today. Give more than one person access to the registrar account.
An agency or a hosting provider can manage your DNS. The domain itself should stay in your organization’s name. If a supplier holds it now, transferring it back is routine, and it goes much better on a quiet week than in the middle of a dispute.
While you are at it, write down where the domain is registered, where the DNS is hosted and who has access. Anyone dealing with an outage will ask for those details first. If an outside firm maintains your site, ask them to confirm all three in writing.
6. Lock it, auto-renew it, and watch the expiry date
Domains lapse for ordinary reasons, like an expired credit card or a renewal notice sent to someone who left. When it happens, the site goes offline and email stops arriving. After the grace and redemption periods, the name goes back on the market, where someone else can register it.
- Turn on auto-renew, and register for several years at a time.
- Turn on registrar lock, which blocks unauthorized transfers.
- Keep the billing card current, and check it once a year.
- Enable two-factor authentication on the registrar account. Whoever controls the domain can receive your email and use it to reset your other passwords.
- Put the expiry date in a shared calendar that belongs to a role rather than a person.
7. Decide how French will work before you need it
If you might publish in both languages one day, settle the structure now. Adding it later means moving URLs, and moved URLs lose search visibility for a while.
For most organizations, a subdirectory such as yourcompany.ca/fr/ is the sensible default. Both languages share one domain and its search authority, and there is only one site to maintain. A separate French domain makes sense when the French operation is a distinct brand with its own staff. For one organization with a translated site, it doubles the upkeep.
On WordPress, multilingual plugins such as Polylang and WPML can put the second language in a subdirectory, and both can also give each language its own domain. When the French side really is a separate brand, a WordPress multisite network is often the cleaner setup. It runs two sites on two domains from one codebase, with one round of updates.
Whatever you choose, register the obvious French spelling of your name as well, even if you never use it. It costs little and keeps it out of someone else’s hands.
When the name you want is taken
It often is, and you still have good options. In rough order of preference, take the .ca if the .com is gone and your market is Canadian. Add a short, natural second word instead of a hyphen or a number. Consider an invented name that is easy to pronounce, which is how many well-known brands began. You can also approach the current holder, knowing that a parked domain handled by a broker will be priced high.
Be wary of an unfamiliar extension picked only because it frees up your first-choice word. People remember addresses that look familiar, and an extension they have never seen makes yours harder to recall.
If you are changing your domain
Moving to a new domain is a migration and follows the same rules. Map every existing URL to exactly one new URL, with permanent redirects in a single hop. Keep the old domain registered for good, because the links pointing to it will be around for years. Add both properties in Google Search Console, use its Change of Address tool, and expect several weeks of movement in the rankings before things settle.
Handled carefully, a domain change costs very little. Handled casually, it can wipe out search visibility that took years to build. If the move includes a large document library, our guide to migrating thousands of documents covers the redirect work in more detail.
When a domain change is part of a larger rebuild, our page on website redesign and modernization explains how we handle it. URL mapping and redirects are planned before launch, to protect your rankings through the move.