How important is it to have a .com domain name?

Is it really that much better than .co, .net, .io or any other popular top-level domain?

We ran an experiment with 1,500 people to find out.

Here are our findings.

Key finding: which domain extension is best in 2022?

• .com domains are over 33% more memorable than URLs with other top-level domains.
• .com is the #1 most trusted TLD, with .co in a close second place.
• When people try to remember a URL, they’re 3.8 times more likely to assume it ends in .com than anything else.

In short, our study shows that .com outperforms all other domain extension options. But read on for more details — and to see how 7 other TLDs performed in our test.

You might be surprised.

Contents

• Trust rankings
• Memorability scores
• Mis-remembrance rate
• Which domain extension is best?
• Study method

How much do people trust .com vs .org, .co and other domain extensions?

A domain people trust is more likely to get clicked on, linked to and shared.

Making it easier to build a brand with.

Here are the perceived trustworthiness scores of the 8 top-level domains we tested, on a scale of 1 – 5:

As you can see, .com comes out on top with a trust score of 3.5.

But it doesn’t win by a huge amount: the .co TLD comes in right behind it with a 3.4. Followed by .org and .us, each with a 3.3.

Bringing up the rear is .biz with a 2.9 trust rating: 17% lower than .com’s. (And .io doesn’t do much better than that.)

Key takeaway: .com is the #1 most trusted domain extension, with .co in a close second place.

How memorable are different domain extensions?

An important factor for any URL is how easy it is to remember.

The question we wanted to answer is, are people more likely to remember URLs with some TLDs over others?

As you can see, yes they are:

The .com domain extension comes out on top here again, with a 44% memorability score.

That means people correctly remembered the .com URL 44% of the time.

Second place goes to .co again, but this time it’s a wider gap: .co earned a 33% memorability score. So it’s a quarter less memorable than .com. Quite significant.

What about comparing .com to two of its oldest competitors, .net and .org? You can see it’s not even close: .net gets a 25% and .org gets a 32%.

Interestingly, .biz has a memorability score of 31%. Which is actually better than .us, .io, .net, and especially .blog (which is the least memorable, at 24%).

I was surprised to see .net perform so much worse on this test than .biz.

However, it makes sense considering that mental categorization is a major part of how memory works.

My theory is that people put the .net TLD in the same mental category as .com: they’re both general common TLDs that are often used for commercial sites.

However, since .com is the most dominant TLD in that category, .net often gets mis-remembered as .com. (This theory is supported by the next test result, which you’ll see in a minute.)

On the other hand, .biz may not fit into the same mental category as .net and .com.

Think about it:

If you see example.com, example.net, and example.biz, doesn’t the .biz version jump out at you a little? (Even if it’s in a bad way.)

That may be why .biz domains are more memorable — despite being less trustworthy — than .net ones.

Just to see all the data we have so far in the same place, here are the memorability results again alongside the trust ratings we saw before.

So far .com is winning this race, with .co in second place overall and .org in third.

Key takeaway: .com URLs are over 33% more memorable than URLs with other TLDs.

When people remember the top-level domain incorrectly, which TLD do they remember instead?

This last factor is an interesting one:

When people remember the URL almost correctly — when they remember the brand name but put the wrong domain extension at the end — which domain extension do they say?

This helps us see how much of a bias people have in favor of each TLD.

For example, if the correct URL was mattressrankings dot net but they misremembered it as mattressrankings dot com instead, that would count as a “point” for the .com TLD.

The results of this test show an even bigger difference between .com vs other domains.

Here’s the data:

First place again goes to .com, by far.

Out of all the wrong-but-almost-right answers, 57 of them said .com instead of the correct TLD. That’s 3.8 times more often than the next highest, .org.

When people aren’t sure which TLD a website uses, they’re much more likely to guess it’s .com than anything else.

In other words, .com domains are still thought of as the default.

The distant second place goes to .org, which people guessed only 15 times: 26% as often as they guessed .com.

Not shown on the chart above is the .co.uk domain suffix, which received two guesses. But it wasn’t a subject of this study (maybe I’ll do another study to cover more country code top-level domains/ccTLDs).

Key takeaway: People are 3.8 times more likely to assume a URL ends in .com than in anything else.

Conclusion: Rankings and comparison of all 8 domain extensions, plus expert opinions

Here are all three ratings for the list of domain extensions in a single chart:

Bottom line:

Are you considering .com vs .org vs .net? If so, according to this data, .com has a sizable edge.

A closer contender in most regards would be .co, which is also one of the most trusted domain extensions as you can see above.

But .com still seems to be the best domain extension:

• .com URLs are over 33% more memorable than URLs with other top-level domains.
• .com is the #1 most trusted TLD, with .co in a close second place.
• When people try to remember a URL, they’re 3.8 times more likely to assume it ends in .com than anything else.

Of course, all of this comes at a price.

Registering a .com domain name is often much more expensive than registering a domain with another TLD: