Three reasons your website visitors will trust a .CA domain

Did you know, even a tiny top-level domain (TLD) name can contain information about your website that would be useful to visitors? A domain extension can indicate your geographical location, purpose or even a little bit of information about your organization.

A top-level domain (to the right of the dot) can be as short as two letters but can still promote feelings of trust in your website visitors. For example, if you choose .CA, here are a few reasons why website visitors will automatically have confidence in your website:

1. The Canadian connection

When you register a .CA domain, you have to indicate your connection to Canada. It’s CIRA’s role as the .CA domain registry to ensure that .CA domains are registered by people and businesses that meet these specific requirements. That is, .CA is for Canadians, not Californians, Catalonians, or chartered accountants from Casablanca.

Why does this matter? Because it ensures that when customers see a .CA domain they know a website is built for (and likely run by) Canadians. Canadians tend to trust other Canadians more, particularly when shopping or doing business online.

Our Canadian Presence Requirements also make it harder to register a .CA domain name for nefarious purposes.

2. Low on the Badness Index

Speaking of nefarious purposes, there is such a thing as a Badness Index for domains. The SpamHaus Project, an international nonprofit organization that tracks spam and related cyber threats such as phishing, malware and botnets, has a list of the 10 Most Abused Top Level Domains.

Their Badness Index takes into account things such as domains that are used to send spam, domains that host malware and other sketchy activities.

Here are a few Badness Index scores (high score=bad):

The numbers speak for themselves, but let’s put it another way: when people visit a .CA website, there’s a really low chance it’s going to be a sketchy site compared to other top-level domains.

3. Ecommerce, the Canadian way

Even the most polite Canadian can get mildly perturbed when they are shopping online and find out that a business isn’t listing prices in Canadian dollars, or isn’t shipping to Canada.

Having a .CA domain name indicates to potential customers that your organization does business in Canada. Knowing their business caters specifically to Canadians increases a potential customer’s confidence, and implicitly answers some of their questions before they even visit your website (e.g. Do they ship to Canada? Do they sell to Canadians using CAD currency?).

In fact, recent survey data tells us that seven in ten Canadians prefer to support Canadian businesses whenever possible. A .CA domain name is the quickest and easiest way to show your business is Canadian, online.

So there you have it. If you want to attract Canadians to your website, you can either put pictures of poutine, appealing Canadiana stock photos, or simply go with a trusted .CA domain.