UK businesses still back British domains, but .com and .store are gaining ground fast
British businesses are still choosing British domain extensions, but they’re no longer defaulting to .co.uk on its own. New data from Gloucester-based web hosting provider Fasthosts, covering domain registrations across 2025 and the first half of 2026, shows UK businesses widening their choice of extension as more of them build for audiences outside the UK.
Nearly two in every three domains registered at Fasthosts in 2025 carried a UK extension. Combined, .co.uk, .uk, .org.uk and .me.uk made up 64.5% of registrations, well ahead of the global picture where .com holds around half the market.
That preference hasn’t gone away, but the mix underneath it is changing. In the first half of 2026, .uk registrations grew 53.8% year on year, the fastest growth of any established extension, taking its share from 10.8% to 13.7%. Over the same period .com registrations rose 42.1%, lifting its share from 24.2% to 28.2%.
.co.uk is still the single biggest extension by volume, and volumes are up, but its share of the overall mix has fallen 8.4 percentage points in a year.
Two smaller extensions have grown faster than anything else on the list. Registrations of .store rose 486.5% year on year, taking its share from 0.7% to 3.5%, and .online grew 119.6%. Going the other way, .net dropped 58%, with its share falling from 1.4% to 0.5%.
Rupert Bedell, managing director at Fasthosts, said: “A domain is usually the first thing a business buys and the first thing a customer sees, so what people pick tells you a lot about where they think their business is heading. The UK extensions still win on trust, and for a business serving customers down the road that’s exactly the right call. What’s changed is how many businesses are now buying a .com alongside it, or picking something like .store because it says what they do before anyone lands on the site.”
January was the busiest month of 2025 by a clear margin, running 34% ahead of December, with April second. August and December were the quietest. Every month in 2026 has grown year on year, with May up 35.9% and June up 31.6%.
Bedell added: “January is always a big month, because that’s when people finally act on the idea they’ve been sitting on since summer. But the interesting thing this year is the mid-year surge. May and June are often modest months for Domain registrations, but this year we’ve seen a continued acceleration throughout. ”
Fasthosts is a UK web hosting and cloud provider based in Gloucester, with its own Tier 4 data centre in Worcester. The company has been helping UK businesses get online since 1998.