The clocks have gone back, the nights are starting to look longer than the domain name for the Welsh village with the name that ends in gogogoch, and thoughts are starting to turn to Christmas and the year ahead.

What will 2022 have in store?

In this blog we look at the latest stats and data to see what the New Year might hold for domain names.

7 domain name trends for 2022

1. .me will continue to be popular

Heart Internet’s data shows that .me has been one of the most popular TLDs of 2021, outside of the usual .coms and .co.uks.

.me has been a hit ever since it was released onto the market in 2018 – the first 100,000 .me domains were registered in just 48 hours.

However, the domain has really come into its own during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The past two years have seen huge amounts of people make the leap into self-employment – one study found that the number of freelancers in the UK went up by 63% in the first few months of the crisis alone.

Many of these people have needed to set up websites and chosen the .me domain over more traditional domains to give their site a more personal feel.

With MasterCard predicting that the gig economy will grow by 17% by 2023, the .me domain looks set to become more popular than ever.

2. .live will continue to flourish

Donuts Inc, the company that manages 242 TLDs, has revealed that registrations of .live increased by 30% in 2021.

This should come as no surprise, after the pandemic forced everyone from yoga teachers to music festival organisers to stream their offerings online.

You might expect the popularity of live streaming to decline as the world returns to its new normal.

However, that’s not what industry experts are suggesting. On study predicts that the global video streaming market will grow by 21% by 2028.

So it looks like the halcyon days of the .live domain are here to stay.

3. The keyword ‘meta’ will skyrocket

In October 2021, Facebook announced that it was rebranding its corporate identity to Meta in a bid to become a key player in metaverse technology.

Shortly after this news broke, sales of domains containing the keyword meta went through the roof.

The metaverse – aka the place where the physical and digital worlds come together – is expected to succeed the current mobile internet.

It’ll begin with things like avatars and 3D meetings and who knows where it might end – Mark Zuckerberg expects that we will socialise, learn, collaborate and play in the interconnected 3D space that the metaverse will become.

4. Descriptive domains will become increasingly popular

Descriptive domains are those that allow businesses to fully utilise both sides of the dot in domain names to make their web address more self-explanatory.

Think buyred.wine or manchester.coffee, for example.

There are multiple benefits to these extensions – they are easy to remember and can contribute to SEO.

In one case study, African headwrap company Wrap Life doubled sales within the space of two months after changing its domain name to thewrap.life.

It’s for these reasons that descriptive domains are expected to increase in popularity over the coming year.

5. Demand for shorter domains will go up

Research suggests that more and more people are registering shorter domains. In fact, non .com domains were 26% shorter in October 2021 than in previous months.

Examples of these shorter domains include ski.rentals, car.show and andserson.family.

6. .eco and eco-related domains will become more popular

At the end of 2021, the COP26 climate change summit took place in Glasgow, UK, inspiring the world to accelerate together towards developing a more sustainable world.

Before the summit, research already suggested that 77% of people in the modernised world wanted to live more sustainably.

As this number increases, eco-related domains will become ever more popular.

7. .uk will maintain its reign

The .uk domain is one of the top five most popular domains sold my Heart Internet in 2021 and it doesn’t look like its popularity is going to wane in 2022.

You can read all about the benefits of the .uk family of domains in our recent blog on the topic.

Also, right now, you can get cheap .uk domain names as part of our big domain name sale.

You can now buy a .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk or .uk domain name for just £1 for the first year.

Visit our domain name search pages to search for your preferred .uk domains.

Once you’ve found one you like the sound of, just enter the code DOMAIN2021 at the checkout to apply your discount.

The promotion applies to the first year only and the domain renews at a non-discounted price.