The new shorter, sharper domain .uk has arrived, but what does that mean to you?

You have heard that the .uk domain name was launched on the 10th June 2014 and providers are offering it for sale. but your website currently runs on the .co.uk domain name. What should you do?

Before we start, lets look at some facts:

The .uk domain has been automatically reserved for you up until the 10th June 2019 if you already own a .co.uk domain. This also applies to those owning .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .plc.uk and .ltd.uk domain names. As long as you remain registered on one of these domains your .uk domain will be reserved for you, so there is no need to panic buy!

For some of you there will have been more than one domain name that existed before the cut off date which share the same website name but have different domain name endings (e.g www.example.co.uk and www.example.org.uk). You can check whether you have the rights to the new .uk by using the Rights lookup tool.

If by the 10th of June 2019 you have decided not to register the new .uk equivalent domain then it will become available for someone else to register. Your existing domain will of course still be yours as long as it remains registered to you. If you renew your existing domain (sticking with .co.uk) at any point, the .uk equivalent will automatically become available for someone else to register.

Price wise, it looks like over the first year or so the prices have some down and the cost to register for one year is now often the same price for .uk as .co.uk. When we first heard about the launch of the new .uk domain the prices seemed to have been hiked up, now though it’s far more reasonable. There isn’t really any reason to register for this new domain until you are actually ready to utilise it.

Hope this helps!