In plain English
It's your business's street address. The building (your website) can be renovated or even rebuilt elsewhere, but as long as you own the address, customers and mail still find you.
Used in a sentence
“We'll point the domain at the new site on launch day; your email stays exactly where it is.”
“Our old web guy registered the domain under his name, and getting it back took a month.”
In detail
You rent a domain from a registrar, renewing it every year or several years at a time. Its DNS settings tell the internet where your website lives and where your email goes. Those settings can change without moving the domain itself, which is how a site can switch builders or agencies without changing its address.
The most important thing about a domain is whose name it's in. If a designer, an agency or a website builder registered it in their account, you don't fully control your own address. It should be registered to your business, with an email you'll always have, and set to renew automatically.
Why it matters for your business
Your domain carries your rankings, your email and your customers' habits. Losing control of it is expensive.
- Register it in your business's name
- Turn on auto-renew
- Keep the login somewhere safe
Easy to mix up
A domain isn't your hosting. The domain is the address; hosting is the computer the site runs on. They can be with the same company or different ones, and moving one doesn't have to move the other.
Related terms
Hosting, HTTPS and Redirect. Or browse the whole glossary.
