If you already own a .co.uk domain name, you may be able to register the .uk version – but make sure you do so before June 2019. After this time, anyone can register these domains and compete with your business.
This means that if you already own frag.co.uk, you may be able to also register frag.uk.
Who does this affect?
In 10 June 2014, Nominet (the UK domain registrar) launched the new shorter, sharper domain name .uk into our UK domain family. If you are an existing customer and own a unique .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .plc.uk or .ltd.uk, a .uk domain name may already have been reserved especially for you until 10 June 2019. More information can be found on their website, The UK Domain.
Should I be worried?
A 123 Reg customer poll showed that 90% of users do not want to risk losing their .uk domains to a competitor. Some registrars are securing these domains for their users, as are we, until 2018/2019 when these will operate like normal .co.uk domains. If you haven’t purchased the .uk counterpart, someone else will be able to claim these.
For all of our customers, we will be arranging registering these .uk domains automatically for the next year, and asking users on their next renewal whether to continue this.
Once I have my .uk domain – what’s best to do?
We like most hosts have set up a redirect from frag.uk to frag.co.uk. This means that our new and old domains still work, and search engines and users will still (for now) use the frag.co.uk address since this is more familiar. We’ve also added this to our SSL certificate, to ensure that users visiting https://frag.uk/ are also redirected without errors.
In absence of other preferences, we recommend this is the best course of action for most websites as it will not affect search engine ranking; whilst also securing your domain.
If you need help, please let us know and we’ll be happy to help!