“Pick any domain, you can always change it later!” We learned the hard way—your domain choice matters more than you think.
That’s what we thought too.
Until it cost us hundreds of users, a month+ of engineering time, and our early SEO traction.
Here’s what happened.
We picked a “.to” domain. One of our partners used “.xyz”.
At first, it felt fine. Plenty of reputable websites use non-dotcom TLDs:
- notion.so
- abc.xyz
- linear.app
- [every-ai-company].ai
So we did the same, choosing something clean, brandable, and available.
What we didn’t realize was how badly this would bite us later. Eventually, we had to swallow the cost and migrate everything to a .com.
Here’s what went wrong:
1/ Major ISP blocklists: PLDT (a huge internet provider in the Philippines—one of our core markets) didn’t allow traffic to our partner’s .xyz domain. Many users simply couldn’t access a critical part of our onboarding flow.
2/ Low trust signal: Fintech runs on trust. Users saw “.to” and immediately questioned our legitimacy. Some assumed we were an African payments app (Tonga owns the .to domain), others flagged it as “scammy” just because it wasn’t familiar.
3/ SEO reset: Changing our domain mid-stream cooked months of SEO progress. We had to re-index everything. Redirects helped, but our organic traffic took a had a hard time recovering from.
4/ Migration hell: Updating the domain across product surfaces, FAQs, customer guides, socials, partners and even hardcoded links took 2 engineers, 1 marketer, and 1 month+. We even missed a bunch of external emails because they were getting sent to our old domain. And we still find stragglers to this day.
Was it annoying? Yes 😟 More than I thought, especially for an early stage startup that should be focusing on other things. Was it avoidable? Um, definitely!
TAKEAWAY:
Cool branding is fun, but don’t underestimate how much pain needing to migrate a domain can create.