.church Domain
Welcome Your Congregation Online
Register your .church domain from just £48.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .church domain?
The .church domain provides a warm, recognisable web address for churches and religious organisations. It helps congregations connect with their community, share service times, and provide spiritual resources.
Who should register .church?
Churches, chapels, religious organisations, and faith-based community groups.
Why choose .church?
- Warm and community-focused
- Instantly recognisable purpose
- Ideal for service information
- Connects congregation and visitors
Who runs .church, and since when
Registry data from the .church 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
- 2014
- Delegated 8 May 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no religious affiliation or charity number checked
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £48.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What a .church domain costs a small congregation
Start with the money, because most congregations run on volunteer time and the annual figure is the decision. A .church domain costs around five times an .org.uk, every year, for as long as the site exists. Over a decade that is a line in the accounts somebody has to justify to a PCC or a trustee meeting. Any page that skips past that is selling rather than advising.
What you get for it is disambiguation, and that is worth more than it sounds. Church names repeat across the country in their hundreds, so the .co.uk and .org.uk versions of a common dedication went long ago and what is left is a name with a town, a county or a number welded onto it. Put the same name in front of .church and the address becomes readable again, and it explains itself to somebody who has never been.
Binky Moon, LLC holds the extension, delegated on 8 May 2014, and it publishes no eligibility criteria. Nobody checks whether you are a church. That cuts both ways: no paperwork for a real parish, and no assurance whatsoever for a visitor. Anyone wanting to know you are what you say you are will look for a registered charity number on the page, not at the letters after the dot. The registry also keeps an unpublished list of premium names, so a short or obvious string can carry a far higher price than the one shown here.
Our steer for most UK congregations is the .org.uk as the working address, with a .church alongside it only where the name is doing marketing work: a church plant, a network of campuses, or something new that has to explain itself.
Is .church the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.church works well if
- Your congregation shares a dedication with dozens of others, and the extension does the work a long hyphenated .org.uk would otherwise have to.
- The address goes on noticeboards, orders of service and a banner outside, where something short that explains itself is worth paying for.
- You run a network of plants or campuses and want one naming pattern that reads the same across every site.
- You are naming something new, and the address has to tell a stranger what it is before they click.
Look elsewhere if
- The budget comes from the collection plate. An .org.uk costs about a fifth as much and carries a UK signal in search that a .church does not.
- The extension certifies nothing. Anyone may register one, so it is no help at all to a visitor checking you are a real congregation.
- Older members and less confident internet users still expect .co.uk or .org.uk, and a proportion will type that instead and land nowhere.
Most UK congregations do better with an .org.uk as the working address, adding the .church only if the name is worth the extra. See .org.uk pricing.
.church vs .org: which should you register?
The .org has been in the root zone since 1985 and has meant "not a shop" for so long that nobody has to think about it. Public Interest Registry runs it, and while the name suggests a charitable purpose there is no test: .org is open to anyone, exactly as .church is.
.org is the safe default. Every age group recognises it, it costs a fraction of a .church, and nothing about it needs explaining on a noticeboard. .church is the descriptive one. It says what the site is in the address itself, which helps when the name alone would not, and it frees up a short readable name that the older extensions exhausted years ago.
If the congregation is UK-based, the real comparison is with .org.uk rather than .org: the same familiarity, our lowest price band, and a UK geographic signal in Google that neither .org nor .church provides.
| .church | .org | |
|---|---|---|
| Says what it is | Yes, before anyone clicks | Only that it is not a shop |
| Registry | Binky Moon, LLC | Public Interest Registry |
| Root zone since | 2014 | 1985 |
| Proof of charity status | None | None |
| Annual cost here | Around five times an .org.uk | Low |
.church domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .church domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. Binky Moon, LLC publishes no eligibility criteria for .church, so there is no denominational test, no charity number to supply and no letter from a bishop or an elder. Any person or organisation anywhere can register one. That is convenient for a small congregation with no administrator, and it is also why the extension is no evidence of anything to a visitor. If you want people to trust the site, put your registered charity number and a real address on it.
Often not, and it is worth being blunt about that. It costs roughly five times an .org.uk every year, and an .org.uk is instantly familiar to the people most likely to be looking for your service times. Where the extra buys something real is when your name is shared with many other churches, or when you are launching a plant that has to explain itself in the address. Where it does not, the difference is better spent on the site itself.
Use the .org.uk as your working address if you are a UK congregation. It costs less, older members recognise it without prompting, and Google reads it as a UK site so it helps you appear for people searching your town. A .church is the better second address when the name needs the extension to make sense of it. Plenty of churches hold both and point one at the other, which costs the price of the extra registration and nothing else.
That depends entirely on whose name it was registered in, which is why it should be the church rather than a person. If the domain sits in a volunteer's own name at their own email address, they hold it, and recovering it after a falling out or a bereavement is slow and sometimes impossible. Changing the registrant is a formal process under ICANN policy and it locks the domain against transfer for 60 days afterwards, so this is far easier to get right at the point of registration than to fix later.
Included with Your .church 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 Community Domains Extensions
Register your .church domain today
Secure your .church domain from just £48.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
