The promotion of your domain name, whether offline or online, is one of many critical factors of a successful site. You have spent countless hours and untold amounts of your hard-earned money to make your domain name as recognizable and memorable as possible. Although it seems small and not very significant, the way you display your website’s address when you are promoting, marketing, and advertising your site can potentially determine whether you gain 100 new visitors or 1,000.

We’re not talking about your logo and graphics here.  Imagine that you have to promote your domain name and you cannot use graphics, only text.  You have several different options available when showing your URL in a text-only format.  Let me also state that when you are promoting your domain name, I nearly always recommend that you capitalize the first letter in each word as it makes the domain much easier to read.

Aesthetics and comprehension

There are several ways that you can display your website when advertising or displaying it only as text.

With or without “http://”

When promoting your name it is not necessary to put the http:// in front of the domain name as browsers will accept and resolve to a domain name fine without http:// in front of the name.

With or without “www”

This one is kind of on the fence, I personally prefer promoting a name without the www, but if you are targeting some demographics you will want to display this.

The other consideration that you need to take into account is the extension of the domain name.  There are still many people who have no idea that a website can end in .biz, .travel, .mobi, .info, or any of the hundreds of other domain extensions.

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Several questions arise when asked the question “Does domain name length have any impact on the popularity of a website?” This is a great speculative question that has many factors and variables that affect the traffic and popularity of a website. It could be branding, the ease of remembering a site, or a myriad of other reasons. However, there have to be some interesting trends that appear when looking at some of the most popular websites, right?

After posing this question, I decided to dig a little deeper and aggregated the domain name lengths from 97 of the most popular websites (according to Alexa’s list). I took the domain name of each site and broke down the domain name length so I could answer the question whether domain name length has an impact on a website’s popularity. Here are the results:

Domain name lengths

Below is a list of the most popular websites broken down by their domain name length:

• 2-character domains: 2 websites (2.1%)
• 3-character domains: 13 websites (13.4%)
• 4-character domains: 12 websites (12.4%)
• 5-character domains: 9 websites (9.3%)
• 6-character domains: 6 websites (6.2%)
• 7-character domains: 19 websites (19.6%)
• 8-character domains: 7 websites (7.2%)
• 9-character domains: 9 websites (9.3%)
• 10-character domains: 8 websites (8.3%)
• 11-character domains: 3 websites (3.1%)
• 12-character domains: 4 websites (4.1%)
• 13-character domains: 3 websites (3.1%)
• 15-character domains: 1 website (1.0%)
• 17-character domains: 1 website (1.0%)
• The average length of a domain = 6.95 characters

You can see from the above numbers that 7-character domain names are clearly the leader, with an impressive nearly 20% share of the most popular websites. So it does appear that shorter your domain name, the better. Another interesting figure is that nearly 63% of the most popular websites on the internet have a domain name length of 7 characters or less. For those of us that are visual learners here’s a chart:

Other interesting results

After compiling this information, several other interesting figures presented themselves:

• Not one of the 97 sites contained a hyphen
• Only one (Hi5.com) contained a number
• 24.7% of the domains started with a vowel
• 17.55 of the domains contained either a double-vowel or double-consonant (e.g. Yahoo; Google; Digg)

In conclusion

So, my question has been answered. Although building a popular website with a long domain can be done, the shorter they are the easier it is to gain popularity.

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