.co.uk or .uk — which should you register?

Both are run by Nominet, the UK registry. .co.uk has been the default British domain since the 1990s; .uk was opened up in 2014 as a shorter alternative. Functionally they are identical — the difference is entirely about recognition and rights.

Rights of registration

When .uk launched, Nominet gave existing .co.uk holders first refusal on the matching .uk name. That right of registration has now expired, so unclaimed .uk equivalents are generally available to anyone on a first-come, first-served basis.

Practically: if you own example.co.uk and never claimed example.uk, someone else may be able to register it. Whether that matters depends on how much traffic and trust sits with your brand.

Which to lead with

• .co.uk still reads as unmistakably British to a UK audience, and is what most people type by reflex.
• .uk is shorter and cleaner — noticeably better for something read aloud, printed on a vehicle, or typed on a phone.
• Neither carries any search-ranking advantage over the other. Both are equally British in the eyes of a search engine.

Is it worth owning both?

For an established business, usually yes — it is a small annual cost to stop someone else trading on a name customers associate with you. For a new venture, register the one you will actually use and add the other when the brand is worth defending.

What is rarely worth it is buying a long tail of variants — .net, .org, .biz, common misspellings — on the theory that someone might take them. That money is almost always better spent on the site itself.

A note on WHOIS privacy

Nominet handles this differently from most registries. Individuals not trading through the domain can opt out of having their address published in the public WHOIS record. If you are registering as a business, your details are published — that is a requirement, not an oversight.