Is it worth switching to a shorter and better domain name?
Decision makers with organizations cannot haphazardly jump at trying something new because there’s a new technology with potential and opportunity. Careful research and consideration has to be made before making a decision that would re-allocate resources to change things up dramatically. Those resources could involve staff time, actual monetary finances, or a change in the current state of reputation and credibility when it comes to the web addresses.
While status quo does keep things as they are, the world is constantly changing around us, especially in a digital age. To implement the right changes strategically and wisely can be the path to significant growth and performance that wouldn’t be possible with minor changes to status quo.
The Biggest Change on the Internet
One of the biggest changes is the internet expansion program, known as new gTLDs (generic top-level domains), that started in 2014. This expanded the internet namespace to over 1,000 new domain extensions far beyond the popularized legacy endings of .com, .net, and .org. Yes, there are hundreds and thousands of domains that have meaningful endings like: .app, .bank, .bible, .blog, .church, .club, .coffee, .events, .live, .media, .network, .news, .photo, .training, .wiki, and many more.
To quantify just how fast these new gTLDs are growing, also known as “not-coms,” the number of not-com websites in the Alexa Top 1 Million (a list of the most popular websites based on traffic) has increased by more than 300% since September 2015, with not-com registrations growing from 7.3 million to 23.9 million.
Here are 3 examples that are helpful to learn from and observe their implementation of this innovation.
Life.Church was lifechurch.tv
Church leaders are beginning to recognize these new domain extensions. Many are becoming aware of .church domains when they’re being used by influential churches. Life.church switched from its previous domain “lifechurch.tv” to “life.church” in October 2015.
Consider how big of a decision this was: the change involved only dropping 2 characters in their domain name, but it affected more than 70,000 in its attendance along with all of the church’s branding, stationery, signage, communications, and more. And yet the church’s leadership made this change as an opportunity to refresh its vision, its logos, and its web address. When our team asked the Life.Church team about how this impacted their church, their response was reassuring: “no negative impact occurred and people continued using their website as usual.”
Other larger churches have also moved their web address, including: menlo.church, ccv.church, and city.church.
Find.Bible was findabible.org
Find.Bible is the worldwide web directory of Bibles and biblical resources in the 6,000+ languages of the world, cataloging print Bibles, print-on-demand Bibles, digital Bibles, audio Bibles, visual Bibles and Bible resources – in multiple formats. Find.Bible ensures that the world’s Bibles and great biblical resources are easy to find, secure, use and share – in every language. While it is possible to search for Scripture and Bible resources online, the sheer quantity of available content is overwhelming; and, not every Scripture is discoverable on search engines.
Find.Bible is currently cataloging over 3,500 Bibles and 77,000 resources as a collaborative and cooperative effort by members of the Forum of Bible Agencies International and the Digital Bible Society.
When we asked the Find.Bible team why getting a .BIBLE domain name was important, they declared: “Having a short and meaningful domain name like Find.Bible has helped people to more easily remember our web address. In the past when we shared a web address, people often didn’t remember whether the domain name had a .COM or .ORG (or something else) on the end. Now we can say that the web address is just Find.Bible and there’s no extra ending to add. People are getting it because it just makes sense!”
Benefits of a New Domain Extension
You might ask, then, why change? Here are some of the benefits to this new domain: it saves people time from typing the previously excessively long domain name (cf. typing fewer characters can save many hours of time), it’s friendlier to mobile users, and it adds that extra “grab attention” factor because it stands out by not being yet another dot-com website. Plus, it’s much easier to find a shorter domain name that’s available.
There you have it. 3 successful upgrades to better domain names by Christian ministry organizations. And there are many more.
With this new internet namespace expansion, the opportunity is now available for your organization to get the very best domain name that can be self-explanatory for what it is that you’re offering. Domain names that makes plain sense and clearly tells people what to expect at that web address reduces any remaining friction that keeps people from going to your website.