insight â‹… 2025
Do Not Use Hyphenated Domain Names
When setting up My Business, Inc. you may find that mybusiness.com is one of the hundreds-of-millions of .com domains already registered. The domain may be inactive, parked or even in use by a competitor.
Adding a hyphen to the domain seems like a natural solution, allowing you to register a domain immediately and at the lowest cost. The domain registrar you are using may even automatically suggest a hyphenated version.
You register my-business.com and begin establishing your business’s online presence.
The problem with hyphens
Hyphens are hard to communicate, hard to remember and hard to type on mobile devices. People forget to mention them, forget to type them and sometimes even believe they are optional. A missing hyphen means customers, vendors, partners and employees interacting with a third-party’s mybusiness.com instead of your my-business.com domain.
The “radio test”
the radio test is a reminder that on the phone, in meetings, doing presentations, at a bar, in an Uber, or in a Zoom call, you’ll be communicating your domain name verbally, so including weird spellings, numerals, and non-verbal symbols like the hyphen, can trip you up when you’re providing your domain name to people, and can make it hard for people to remember.1
“Visit my business dot com” is clear and memorable. The listener needs only to remember the name of your business. “Visit my hyphen business dot com” is much less clear and memorable. The listener must remember the name of your business, that the domain name contains a hyphen, the location of the hyphen in the domain name, and the listener must understand that the hyphen is required.
The consequences of a hyphenated domain
Lost traffic
At best, a visitor who does not type the hyphen will visit an error page and decide to search the web for your business instead. Worse, they may encounter an error page and believe that your business has shut down. Worst of all, they may find themselves completely unaware that they are viewing the website of your competitor through the lens of your hard-earned reputation and advertising spend.
Lost emails
Email is the universal method of business communication. Email depends on the accurate addressing of emails. A customer, employee, partner or vendor missing a hyphen when addressing an email to your company may cause leads to go unanswered, customers to be ignored, and even confidential information to be leaked.
Millions of US military emails have been mistakenly sent to Mali, a Russian ally, because of a minor typing error. […] “Human error is by far the most significant security concern on a day-to-day basis,” Mr Stransky said. “We just can’t control every single human, every single time”.2
Lost credibility
Internet users rarely encounter hyphens in domains. Popular cybersecurity advice, especially when distributed through corporate training programs, encourages internet users to treat hyphens with skepticism.
Scammers will often register fake domain names that are similar to the one owned by a legitimate company. Using hyphens to mimic the URL, as in this example, is a common tactic. […] To summarize our tips for avoiding phishing scams: […] If the URL in a link contains any hyphens, be suspicious.3
Lost value
Premium domain names are valuable assets that can sell for millions of dollars. The right domain can enhance not only a business’s brand but also its balance sheet. Hyphenated domain names are rarely considered premium and have little resale value. A hyphenated domain has never appeared in the top domain name sales4.
Hyphenated domains are rare
As of July 2025, no website in the top 100 most popular websites relies on a hyphenated domain. Out of the top 1,000 most popular websites, less than 1% rely on a hyphenated domain.5
Internet common sense dictates that you should never, ever use a hyphen in a domain name.6
The right domain for your business
The ideal domain name for your business is an exact-match .com domain name. Acquiring the exact-match .com domain name is one of the best investments a business with an online presence can make.
A budget option is to affix a business or product-related keyword to your domain. If “My Business, Inc.” sells fishing supplies, mybusinessfishing.com is a suitable alternative.
Get in touch with hello@g0t.com⌝ for guidance and support in finding and acquiring the right domain for your business.
Footnotes
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Namecheap > Does your Domain Name Pass the Radio Test?⌝ ↩
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BBC News > Typo sends millions of US military emails to Russian ally Mali⌝ ↩
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Digital Check > Two Simple Rules That Can Spot Nearly Every Email Phishing Scam⌝ ↩
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“Rely” means that they do not also own the unhyphenated version of their business name. ↩
