GoDaddy’s Been the Daddy of Domains for 29 Years. Here’s What It Knows About Your Next Client

Walton Goggins has a theory about daddies. “What makes a daddy?” he asks. “Maybe it’s just being the very best at what you do.”

If you ask GoDaddy, it’s been doing exactly that for nearly 30 years. Since 1997, the company has watched more than 20 million customers claim their place on the internet, one domain at a time.

Along the way, Amy Jennette, GoDaddy’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, says that they noticed something: “That moment of registering their first domain is often the moment someone stops dreaming, and things become real.”

Many hosts are packaging domains into their services. And if anyone’s earned the right to weigh in on how to do it well, it’s GoDaddy.

GoDaddy’s Small Business Research Lab has surveyed more than 60,000 microbusiness owners since 2018, and what keeps coming up is that most businesses don’t start with a plan.

“Most businesses don’t start with a business plan — they start with an idea and then start brainstorming what to call it. Which naturally leads them to securing a domain,” Jennette adds.

Smaller cities like Frankfort, Illinois and Katy, Texas — not just San Francisco and LA — are ranking among the fastest-growing entrepreneurial hotspots in the country. That’s an entire client base that’s growing and hungry for guidance.

“One piece of advice for new founders is to always keep your target audience in mind. If your business serves a younger demographic, you’ll need to take different steps than a business targeting Boomers, for example,” Jennette explains. “Understanding what consumers want will help them navigate the best way to build a brand identity their audience will resonate with.”

There are plenty of success stories that followed this advice — just look at a couple named Darren and Theresa Carter, who started out with an idea and a smoker. After Darren left the steel industry, the Carters launched Carter’s BBQ out of the Cleveland area.

Partly because they loved barbecue, partly because as foster and adoptive parents, they saw building something of their own as a path to generational wealth. Pop-ups turned into catering, catering turned into an online store.

Jennette shared a few other stories — like Harp Vision, a Baltimore soap and wellness brand two chronic pain sufferers built from their kitchen during the pandemic, and Scull House Sweets, a cottage bakery a hospice social worker started as a creative outlet that’s since grown into wedding cakes.

If you sell domains, you should probably make your customers aware that 80% of consumers will skip a website with an oddly-spelled domain name. For Gen Z, that goes up to 85%.

Consumers also prefer fully spelled-out words (43%), short domains of two words or less (40%), and easy pronunciation (38%).

As for what they avoid? Misspelled words (56%), a domain that doesn’t match the business name (55%), hyphens (20%), and numbers (20%).

Don’t assume your clients can depend on SEO or social traffic to compensate for a bad domain, either — linking in their Linktree or social captions won't do the job. In fact, 50% of consumers still type a business’s domain name directly, so a misspelled domain could lose visitors before they can even find the page.

“Based on the data, we’d recommend a new small business owner selects a domain that is short and sweet, with correctly spelled words that are easy to pronounce and match your business’ name,” Jennette says.

Thirty years of watching entrepreneurs get started buys you a certain amount of credibility. So yes, for hosting providers who double in domains, GoDaddy’s advice is worth considering.