Back in the wild and wooly days of the early Internet, navigating the web was trickier than it is today. Computers on the web corresponded with one another using Internet Protocol Addresses, or IP Addresses, which look like this: 174.199.239.174.
Could you imagine having to type a long string of numbers into your browser every time you want to visit a site? It’d be a miracle if people ever got to their intended online destination.
Luckily for us, a group of computer scientists developed something known as the Domain Name System or DNS. While computers are great with numbers, humans tend to remember words better than numbers. So, thanks to the DNS, instead of having to memorize long number chains, people could now use a domain name to identify and navigate to web properties.
Let’s take a look at the different parts of a universal resource locator or URL and domain name so you have a better understanding of how they operate.
Unless you’ve been hiding in a tech desert for the past 20 years, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Google. They’re an online powerhouse, and they use a wide range of IP addresses; however, to use their site, all you have to do is navigate to “google.com”
The URL “www.google.com” is comprised of three unique parts, as you see below.
www
The “www” stands for “world Wide web,” and this doesn’t need to be typed into your browser when navigating to a website. Instead, most browsers will automatically apply it for you.
This part of the URL is called the second-level domain or SLD. The second-level domain is the part of the domain name that comes before the top-level domain (in this case, the .com.)
.Com
This part of the URL is called the top-level domain or TLD. TLDs were proposed as a means of further categorizing online domains and made the Internet easier to navigate.
TLDs were meant to help you understand the purpose of a website. For example, the .com TLD stands for “commercial,” and it’s the most widely-recognized TLD in use.
Top-level domains also made having more online domains possible. Think of it this way: yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.org, all thanks to those TLDs.
Nowadays, more than 1,500 generic TLDs or domain extensions are available for purchase, and they’re all worthy of consideration.
While you might, at first, feel inclined to purchase a .com, don’t shy away from using a newer TLD. Finding a domain name with a popular TLD can be difficult as the Internet is saturated with websites, and some people invest in and hold on to domain names.
You can look at different domain extensions here to help you decide on the best domain name for your online presence. I hope you found this helpful, please leave a comment if