Should You Use Your Own Name as a Domain Name? Pros and Cons

Using your own name as a domain name is a good choice when you are the brand: a freelancer, consultant, writer, speaker or creator whose work follows you from topic to topic. It’s a weaker choice when you’re building a business you might grow beyond yourself or sell one day. This guide weighs the pros and cons, shows how to pick the best version of your name if the obvious one is taken, and explains how to protect it.

The short version: register your name as a domain anyway, even if you build your main project under a brand. It’s cheap insurance for your reputation, and you can always point it at whatever you build.

Own name or brand name: a quick comparison

Pros of using your own name as a domain name

• It builds your personal brand. Every article, talk or project points back to you, so your reputation grows with your work rather than with one product.
• It never goes out of date. A topic-based name such as “bestkitchenblenders” boxes you in; your name fits whatever you do in five years.
• It matches how people find you. Clients, employers and journalists search for your name. A site at your name gives them the right result.
• It protects your reputation. If you own yourname.com, nobody else can put something there that people confuse with you.
• It’s easy to remember for people who already know you, and easy to put on a business card or in an email signature.

Cons of using your own name as a domain name

• It’s hard to sell. A website on your personal name is tied to you, so buyers of websites usually prefer brandable names that they can keep using. If you might sell, see how website flipping works before you choose.
• It can limit growth. If you hire writers or build a team, a personal name keeps the spotlight on you, which may not suit the business you want.
• Availability. If your name is common, the .com may be taken, and variations can be harder to remember.
• Privacy. Your name, your work and your site are linked in public. Domain privacy hides your contact details in the public registration record, but not the fact that the site is yours.
• Spelling. If people often misspell your name, they’ll misspell the address too.

When your own name is the right choice

• You sell your skills: writing, design, development, coaching, consulting, speaking.
• You want a portfolio, CV or personal blog that follows you through your career.
• You write about several topics and don’t want to be tied to one niche.
• Your name is fairly distinctive and easy to spell.

When a brand name is better

• You’re building a product, an online shop or a niche site you might sell.
• You plan to grow a team that does most of the work.
• You’d like to keep your private life separate from the business.
• Your name is very common or hard to spell.

Using both: your name and a brand

You don’t have to choose only one. Three common set-ups work well:

• Your name as the hub. Your personal site introduces you and links to each project or business you run under its own brand. That’s how this site works.
• A brand as the main site, your name as a redirect. Register yourname.com and point it at the business site or your author page there, so people who search for you still arrive in the right place.
• A brand with a strong author page. Publish under the brand, but give yourself a detailed author page with your background and links to your profiles, so readers and search engines can see who’s behind the work.

Real examples

Moz is the classic case of moving from a founder-led blog to a brand. Moz’s own history page says it was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004 as SEOmoz, a blog and online community, and rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz in 2013 as it grew into a software company. A brand name gave it room to become more than its founders.

This site shows the mixed approach. arsalanmasood.com is my personal blog, under my own name, because it’s about what I learn and do. My agency, A Digital Motive, and my marketplace for buying and selling websites, DigiFlippers, use brand names, because they’re businesses with their own customers and could grow without me. Disclosure: I founded both.

Many well-known marketers also run sites under their own names, such as neilpatel.com, while others chose a topic brand from the start, so both routes clearly work. The question is which fits your plans.

How to pick the best version of your name

If yourname.com is free, register it. If it isn’t, try these in order:

1. Add your middle initial (janebdoe.com) or use your full first name if you usually shorten it.
2. Add a short word about what you do: janedoewrites.com, janedoedesign.com, hellojanedoe.com.
3. Try another extension such as .me, .co or a country domain, if your audience is mostly in one country. A .com is still the easiest for people to remember.
4. Avoid hyphens and numbers, which are easy to forget and hard to say out loud.

Say it out loud to someone and ask them to type it. If they get it right first time, it’s a good domain.

How to register and protect it

• Register it with a reputable registrar. Namecheap, for example, includes domain privacy free on eligible domains through Withheld for Privacy, which replaces your personal email with a forwarding address in the public record. See the Namecheap review.
• Turn on auto-renew and two-factor authentication. Losing your own name to an expired registration is painful and can be expensive to recover.
• Register for several years if you’re sure; it’s one less renewal to forget.
• Consider common misspellings of your name and point them at your main domain.

What to put on a personal-name site

• A clear home page that says who you are and what you do in one or two sentences.
• An about page with your background, experience and a photo.
• Your work: a portfolio, case studies, articles or talks, whatever proves what you can do.
• A way to contact you: a simple form or a professional email address.
• A blog if you want to be found for what you know, not only for your name.

A professional email address on your own domain, such as hello@yourname.com, also looks more credible than a free webmail address. Namecheap, for example, offers a one-month free trial of its Private Email, and many web hosting plans include email accounts.

How Google shows your name

When Google lists a page, it shows a site name next to it. Google says this is chosen automatically, mainly from your home page and from WebSite structured data, and it recommends a concise, commonly recognised name used consistently across your home page; it also lets you suggest an alternative name. For a personal site, your name is a natural site name, and SEO plugins can add the structured data for you. The WordPress SEO tutorial covers the setup.

Can you change your mind later?

Yes. If you start on your own name and later move to a brand (or the other way round), Google’s guide to site moves says to redirect each old address to the new one with permanent (301) redirects, which don’t cause a loss in PageRank, and to use Search Console to monitor the move. Keep the old domain registered and the redirects in place, so old links and bookmarks keep working.

Common mistakes

• Waiting too long. Names don’t get more available over time. Register yours now, even if you won’t use it for a year.
• Choosing a clever spelling of your name to get a free .com. People will type the normal spelling and land somewhere else.
• Using a niche word in a personal domain (janedoeseo.com) when you might change what you do. Keep the extra word broad, such as “writes” or “studio”.
• Letting it lapse. An expired personal domain can be registered by someone else and used in ways you can’t control.

A quick checklist

• Is your name easy to spell and say?
• Is the .com (or a good variation) available?
• Are you the product, or is the business the product?
• Might you sell the site one day?
• Are you comfortable with your name being linked to everything on the site?

Ready to build it? See how to start a blog and the best WordPress hosting to get it online.