Buying the .ca as Well

Why a second extension

Two reasons, and one of them is much stronger than the other.

The weak reason is capturing people who type the wrong one, which happens less than registrars imply.

The strong reason is preventing somebody else from holding it, since a competitor or an opportunist with your name on a different extension is a genuine problem.

At a few dollars a year, the second reason justifies it on its own for most businesses.

Which one to use

A real decision rather than an obvious one, for a Canadian business.

The .ca signals a Canadian business plainly, which matters for a local service business and is a small trust signal for Canadian customers.

The .com is more familiar, is what people assume by default, and matters more if you sell beyond Canada.

Either works. What matters is choosing one as the primary, using it consistently everywhere, and redirecting the other to it.

Running both as live sites is the mistake, since it splits your search visibility across two addresses showing the same content.

Setting up the redirect

• Choose one as primary and use it everywhere.
• Redirect the other to it, permanently.
• Redirect at the domain level, not page by page.
• Check it works with and without the www.
• Renew both on auto-renewal.

The third is worth stating: a visitor typing the secondary domain should land on the equivalent page, and where that is not configurable, the homepage is acceptable.

A worked example

A business trading on a .com that had never registered the .ca.

A competitor in a neighbouring city registered it and put up a page offering the same services.

Anybody assuming the Canadian extension, which a proportion of local customers do, arrived at a competitor.

Recovering it was not straightforward, since the competitor had registered it legitimately and had a plausible use for it.

It was eventually resolved commercially, at a cost far above what a decade of registration fees would have been.

The registration would have cost less per year than a single tank of fuel for the van.

The .ca eligibility requirement

Worth knowing, since it is unusual among extensions.

The .ca has Canadian presence requirements, meaning the registrant must meet criteria such as being a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or a corporation incorporated in Canada.

Which is a genuine advantage: it means fewer overseas speculators hold Canadian names, and the extension carries more meaning than an open one.

For a Canadian business the requirement is satisfied automatically and it is simply part of the registration.

It also means a competitor abroad cannot easily take it, which narrows the risk to domestic ones.

Email on the second domain

A question that follows immediately and has a simple answer.

Use one address for email, matching whichever domain is primary, and do not run two sets.

Two email domains means correspondence arriving from two addresses, invoices that do not match the website, and confusion about which is real.

Where the secondary domain might receive mail, forward it to the primary rather than treating it as a separate mailbox.

That catches anything sent to the wrong address without creating a second identity.

Which others are worth it

Very few, and registrars sell all of them.

Common misspellings of your name, if the name is genuinely easy to misspell, which is one or two rather than a list.

A shorter version, if your name is long and people abbreviate it in conversation.

And a former name, if the business was renamed and the old address is still in circulation.

Not worth it: the long tail of newer extensions, the country codes of countries you do not operate in, and the hyphenated variants that nobody types.

Where the redirect can go wrong

Worth checking once rather than assuming, since a broken redirect is invisible to the business.

The secondary domain needs its own certificate, or a certificate covering both, otherwise anybody typing it sees a security warning before the redirect happens.

Which is a common oversight, since the redirect is configured and the certificate is not.

The redirect should also be the permanent kind, so search engines understand the relationship and consolidate the two addresses.

Testing takes seconds: type the secondary address in a browser and confirm you land on the primary with no warning.

The counter-case

Where one is enough.

A very distinctive business name that nobody would plausibly want or arrive at by accident.

A business operating only in one country with no ambiguity about which extension applies.

And anybody for whom the annual cost of several registrations is a genuine consideration, in which case one extension and a good listing is a perfectly reasonable position.

The defensive argument is strongest for names that are descriptive or generic, since those are the ones somebody else has a reason to want.

Keeping both renewed

A small risk introduced by holding two, and worth handling deliberately.

The secondary domain is the one nobody notices lapsing, since nothing visibly breaks when it does.

Which means it can expire quietly and be registered by somebody else, producing exactly the situation you bought it to prevent.

Both should be on auto-renewal, on the same account, with a card that is current.

And both worth checking annually, since the secondary is the one an expired card takes down without anybody noticing.

What the upsell looks like

Worth recognising, since it arrives at the moment of registering.

A registrar will offer a bundle of extensions at checkout, frequently discounted for the first year and renewing at a higher rate.

It will present them as protecting your brand, which is a real concern applied to a list far longer than it warrants.

The cost is not the first year but the renewals, indefinitely, for domains nobody will ever type.

Two extensions is a considered position. Twelve is a subscription that somebody sold you at checkout.

What to do

1. Register both the .com and the .ca.
2. Choose one as primary.
3. Redirect the other permanently.
4. Use the primary everywhere, consistently.
5. Set both to auto-renew.
6. Decline the rest.

The fourth is what stops the pair becoming confusing, since a business using one on the van and the other in its email signature has created its own problem.

Two registrations, one redirect and a calendar reminder is the whole of what most businesses need here, and it is settled once rather than revisited.

Registering it in the right name is covered in registering the business name and the domain.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.