.cafe Domain
A Domain Brewed for Coffee Culture
Register your .cafe domain from just £41.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .cafe domain?
The .cafe domain is a natural fit for coffee shops, tea rooms, and independent cafés. It immediately tells customers where they can find their next great cup, and pairs beautifully with location or brand names.
Who should register .cafe?
Cafés, coffee shops, tea rooms, and independent food-and-drink establishments.
Why choose .cafe?
- Instantly recognisable purpose
- Perfect for local discovery
- Pairs naturally with brand names
- Memorable and distinctive
Who runs .cafe, and since when
Registry data from the .cafe delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2015
- Delegated 12 March 2015
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no trade, premises or licence requirement
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £41.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Where the missing accent in .cafe can go
Every language that handed us this word puts an accent on it. Cafe is cafe only in English; a French, Spanish or Portuguese speaker writing the name of their own business reaches for the acute without thinking. The top-level domain has no accent and never will, because the string sitting in the root zone is four plain ASCII letters and that is what the DNS was given.
There is a partial answer. Identity Digital, which runs .cafe through Binky Moon, supports internationalised domain names including words that need diacritics, with the exact characters permitted set per extension in IANA's Repository of IDN Practices. So the accent can live on the left of the dot, in the part you choose, even though it can never appear on the right. Test the exact name before you commit, because the character table is per extension rather than universal, and a name that works in one ending may be refused in another.
.cafe reached the root zone in March 2015, a year behind most of the food and drink endings, and it sits beside .coffee and .restaurant from the same operator. The three are not interchangeable. .coffee suits a roaster or a bag of beans, .restaurant suits somewhere people book a table, .cafe suits somewhere people walk into.
Walking in is the point and it is also the honest limit. A cafe lives on local search, on a Google Business Profile and on people who are four streets away with twenty minutes spare. Google reads .cafe as a generic extension with no country meaning, so it does nothing for you there that a .co.uk would not do better. Buy it because the name reads beautifully above a door, not because you expect it to bring anybody through one.
Is .cafe the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.cafe works well if
- Your cafe name plus the word is what customers already say, so the domain is simply the name written down rather than a compromise.
- You are opening a second site or a roastery arm and want the cafe side to have an address of its own that reads instantly.
- The address goes on cups, awnings and a shopfront window, where four clean letters after the dot look better than co dot uk.
- You want to register an accented version of the name at the second level, which the registry supports where the character table allows it.
Look elsewhere if
- Almost all of your customers find you through local search and Google Maps, where a .co.uk carries a UK signal and .cafe carries none.
- You are pricing a domain against a very thin margin. This costs several times a .co.uk every year, on a business where every recurring cost is scrutinised.
- Half the people you tell will type cafe with an accent or reach for .com out of habit, so you end up buying more than one domain anyway.
Trading from one high street to local regulars? A .co.uk does more for search and costs far less each year. See .co.uk pricing.
.cafe vs .co.uk: which should you register?
For an independent cafe this comes down to whether the domain is a sign or a search asset. .cafe is a sign: short, warm, unmistakable above a door or on a takeaway cup. .co.uk is a search asset: Google reads it as a UK country signal, which is a real advantage in the results your customers actually use.
The second difference is cost, and on a hospitality margin it is not trivial. A .cafe renewal costs several times a .co.uk renewal, every year, for a business where a recurring bill gets questioned annually. The third is privacy: a UK individual registering a .co.uk gets their name and address withheld from public WHOIS under Nominet's rules at no charge, while privacy on a .cafe is a paid extra.
The pattern that works for most independents is a .co.uk carrying the website and the .cafe held alongside it for the printed material, redirecting home.
| .cafe | .co.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| UK local search | No country signal | Clear UK signal |
| In the root zone since | March 2015 | 1985 |
| Accented second level | Supported by the registry | Supported by Nominet |
| WHOIS privacy | Paid add-on | Free for UK individuals |
| Annual cost | Several times a .co.uk | Low |
.cafe domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .cafe domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyYou can put the accent to the left of the dot but not to the right. Identity Digital supports internationalised names including words needing diacritics, and the characters permitted are published per extension in IANA's Repository of IDN Practices. So a name like lecafé.cafe is possible where the table allows the character, while the ending itself stays as four plain letters. Register the unaccented spelling too and point one at the other, because most people will type it without.
.cafe describes a place and .coffee describes a product. Both are run by Binky Moon, part of Identity Digital, and .coffee is the older of the two, delegated in December 2013 against March 2015 for .cafe. A roaster selling beans online reads better on .coffee. A shop with tables, a counter and opening hours reads better on .cafe. Where a business does both, the choice usually follows whichever side actually pays the rent.
No. Google treats .cafe as generic with no geographic meaning, so it carries no locality signal whatsoever. Local visibility comes from a complete and verified Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone details across the web, real reviews and a site that loads quickly on a phone. A .co.uk at least gives Google a UK country signal. Choose .cafe for how the name looks and sounds, and do the local search work separately.
Only if the name is the reason. At several times the annual cost of a .co.uk, it earns its place when the exact name you want is available here and awkward everywhere else, or when the address is going on packaging and signage where it will be read far more often than it is typed. For a cafe whose customers arrive from Google Maps and word of mouth, the honest answer is that a .co.uk does more of the work for less of the money.
Included with Your .cafe Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Food & Drink Domains Extensions
Register your .cafe domain today
Secure your .cafe domain from just £41.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
