The Role of Domains in Building Trust: How Your Website Name Affects Credibility

For any business in 2025, building a website is one of the most important factors in gaining recognition and reaching your audience. The world has steadily become more digitalised, and without a strong, professional online presence, it has become almost impossible to incite credibility and utilise the full potential of your target audience. This all starts, however, with finding the right domain. With a domain name generator, you can easily pick the perfect name for your business.

Back in 1985, when domains were first introduced, the process of doing this was easy. At the time, the internet was still in its infancy, which means domains were limited to just a few TLDs – with ‘.com’, ‘.edu’, and ‘.org’ being the main choices. With less competition and a smaller audience to target, businesses and individuals could simply secure a domain name that aligned with their needs and goals, with fewer rules and restrictions on registration.

But in 2025, the playing field has expanded. There are over 1.1 billion websites on the internet now, with 43% of those websites already utilising the ‘.com’ TLD. Akin to this, the domains ‘.edu’ and ‘.org’ have more or less fallen to the wayside, with businesses more intent on utilising industry-specific or geographically targeted domain extensions.

The Importance of Domains

Of course, you might be thinking: how important is a domain name, really? If ‘.com’ was the most popular TLD back in 1985 and still is now, why buy domain extensions that aren’t ‘.com’? Well, there are two specific reasons.

Firstly, as we mentioned before, over 43% of websites are already utilising ‘.com’, which means the domain you want to register might not be available – not to mention, the SEO efforts required to rank high on Google might be more intensive than your budget allows. Secondly, a domain is far more important than you might give it credit for. Apart from being an indicator of your organisation’s identity and location, it also plays a crucial role in building trust with users, contributing massively to your online credibility.

How a Domain Affects Your Credibility

The domain is the cornerstone of your business, being the first thing that users – and potential buyers – will interact with. With this in mind, you can’t always just choose the easiest option, because what might be the easiest, could also be the most damaging.

Let’s say you own a tech business that operates solely in the UK, and yet you operate under a ‘.com’ domain name. For users who come across your site, the immediate perception could be that your business is global or not specifically tailored to the UK market. This can then lead to confusion, and in some cases, mistrust. A ‘.com’ domain for a UK-based business might signal to users that the business is either too large, impersonal, or not genuinely rooted in the local market, while they might prefer to engage with companies that cater directly to their needs.

Additionally, using a ‘.com’ domain when you’re clearly a local business might make it harder for you to be successful in your SEO campaign. Search engines like Google have been increasingly prioritising local results in recent years, with country-specific TLDs helping to improve visibility and overall authority. If you have a local business, with a local domain, and you rank high in location-related search results, the chances are you will build credibility in your area of expertise and have a far greater chance of getting new customers onboard.

But it’s not just localised domains that you should be looking into. Let’s say you’re a global tech company, and you want to give yourself the best chance of tapping into a competitive market. Choosing a ‘.com’ domain might seem like the obvious choice, but it could be detrimental for a number of reasons.

As mentioned before, ‘.com’ domains are becoming increasingly difficult to secure, and even if you do secure the domain name you want, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd – hampering your SEO efforts and stopping you from building your website as a credible source for users. To get around this, many businesses are choosing more industry-specific options. TLDs like ‘.tech’, ‘.ai’, or ‘.io’ could be far better to immediately communicate what your business does. Not to mention, they can help you stand apart from competitors, which will then assist you in scaling the business to create a distinct, trustworthy identity.

Choosing the Right Domain

In terms of choosing the right domain, it’s all about taking an inward look at what your company is offering, and what might help you connect with potential customers. If your company leans in on the fact that it’s local, then a local domain could be the best option to hammer in that fact, and help users recognise they are heading in the right direction. If your business is global, then an industry-specific domain might be the best option, helping you to immediately signal to your audience exactly what your business does. Alternatively, there are more niche, quirky options, such as ‘.xyz’, ‘.co’, or ‘.me’, which can give your business more of a unique, modern feel, and can be a great way to show your company’s playful side.

We’re not saying that the ‘.com’ domain should be avoided at all costs, of course, but it’s worth taking some time to clarify what domain works best with your brand and will be credible enough for users to explore. Even in the case of localised domains, you can have a global company and still utilise multiple localised domains – using ‘.com’ as the main website, and ‘.co.uk’, ‘.jp’, or ‘.it’ as localised alternatives. In fact, this could be a great idea to focus your SEO campaign and build online credibility through optimising different content for your website – all the while, ‘.com’ remains a constant basepoint.

The Process of Building Trust

When it comes to why building trust is important, this is another one of the cornerstones that will dictate whether your business is successful or not in the online space. In today’s digital age, where businesses and services are just a click away, users have to feel confident about the credibility or security of a website. If they aren’t, then they’re unlikely to proceed with a purchase, share personal information, or even engage with the content in the first place. And if you don’t have users doing that, then you don’t have a company that will stick around for very long.

Building trust is also essential because of the type of digital age we’re living in right now. In another recent study, it was found that cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common, with one report claiming that there are around 6 billion malware attacks every year. In line with this, the dangers of cybercriminals and data protection have become even more publicised, which means customers are more wary – in fact, research has shown that users make a split-second judgement about a site based solely on its URL. If you want to gain customer loyalty and improve conversion rates, then, this all starts with the domain. Users need to know that they can trust your website before they even click on the link, and this should be given to them with a domain that either indicates exactly who you are, where you operate, or what the identity of your brand looks like.

Maintaining Trust in 2025

If you have achieved that, then your next mission is to maintain the trust that users have given you, and work to nurture those relationships. The domain was the first port of call, but once you have that, it’s all about creating an intuitive, easy user experience, along with consistent and transparent communication, consistent quality, and of course, ongoing cybersecurity efforts to keep them safe.

If you decide down the line that you want to change your domain, this is okay, but there has to be a logical reason for doing so – for instance, the goal of your brand, the geography, or the industry-type changes – and you have to let your customers know. While you’ve probably done a lot to get them on board, you should never forget that it was your domain name that did all the initial work. Changing that is not something that will go unnoticed, and the last thing you want is for converted customers to have a reason to lose some of the trust they’ve already placed in you.

Conclusion

So there we have it. The first thing you need to do as a new company in 2025 is not build a website, but find the perfect domain name that can immediately plant that seed of credibility. Remember, there is not necessarily a wrong option here. As we’ve noted, ‘.com’ is still widely used. But it’s your job to understand whether the benefits of using it outweigh the negatives, and vice versa, whether the negatives of utilising an alternative domain name drown out the obvious benefits that it can bring about. Then, once you have achieved that, you can start creating an online hub where users feel safe, engaged, and incentivised to make a purchase and become loyal customers.