Website name ideas: how to get from two hundred candidates down to one

Website name ideas arrive in bulk and leave in bulk. The problem is never generating two hundred candidates, it is the process that gets you from two hundred to one without losing a week or settling out of exhaustion. This is that process, in five passes.

Everything below assumes one thing: the name and the domain are the same decision. If you are still generating, the website name generator checks every candidate against the registry as it produces it, which removes most of the field before you get attached to anything.

Pass one: generate far more than feels reasonable

Two hundred is not too many. The reason to generate widely is not that the two hundredth name will be the winner. It is that you cannot kill your favourite until you have alternatives, and a shortlist of six makes every cut feel like a loss.

Write one line describing the site: the subject, the reader, and the register you want to write in. Run it in more than one style. Brandable and compound will give you two lists that feel genuinely different, and the difference tells you something about what the site should sound like.

Pass two: cut on availability, and cut hard

Anything whose .com is already registered goes, unless you have a specific and articulable reason to fight for it. This single pass usually removes more than half the list, and it removes it for free.

Doing this pass second, rather than last, is the whole trick. Names you never see are names you never mourn. The failure mode everybody knows is the opposite: three weeks of deliberation followed by the discovery that the winner was gone before you started.

Pass three: the mouth test

Read what survives out loud, in a full sentence, as though telling somebody about the site at a party. Two things fall out immediately.

• Names that need spelling. Every one of them is a permanent small tax on word of mouth.
• Names that sound like something else. Compounds are especially prone to a second reading that is funny once and tiresome forever.

Anything that survives being said out loud twice is a real candidate. Expect this pass to take the list down to about twenty.

Pass four: the memory test

Write the twenty down, close the file, and come back tomorrow. Try to type them from memory before looking. What you can reproduce, your readers can reproduce.

This is the pass people skip because it costs a day, and it is the one that most reliably identifies the difference between a name you like and a name that works. A name you cannot recall a day later is not memorable, however clever it looked on screen.

Pass five: the ten year test

For the five or six left, ask what happens if the site succeeds and changes. Does the name still fit if the subject widens, if the format changes, if you move country, if it stops being a personal project?

This is where narrow descriptive names lose. They are the best names on day one and the worst on year three, because the thing they describe is the thing you have moved past. Slightly abstract names cost you a little clarity at the start and buy you room later.

Making the final call

At this point you have maybe three names and no test left that separates them. Two things help.

First, look at the value estimate. It reads length, extension and pronounceability, and while it cannot price a name, it will tell you when one of your three sits in a different class from the others. That is a real signal about how the name will wear.

Second, write the sentence you will use to introduce the site, with each name in it. The one that makes the sentence shorter usually wins, because that sentence is going to be said thousands of times.

Register before you announce

The gap between deciding and registering is the only window in which somebody else can take the name. Close it the same hour. Registration costs a small yearly fee at any registrar, and it is the cheapest insurance in the whole process.

Keep the losing names and the reason each one lost. Six months later somebody will ask why the site is not called the obvious thing, and a two line answer beats reopening the argument. If you want more patterns to feed into pass one, business name ideas lists the constructions that still have free .com names in them.