The impact of domain name length on website popularity

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.