Buy your .help domain today

A .help domain is used mostly for customer support, product documentation and knowledge bases that sit alongside a main website. That makes it a companion address rather than a replacement, so your marketing site stays where it is and the help content moves somewhere shorter and easier to say out loud.

Software vendors and SaaS platforms are the heaviest users, and the same pattern extends to hardware brands, payment providers, learning platforms and consultancies. Live examples include a FTSE 100 consumer health company running its help center on the extension and a government software vendor publishing release notes and product documentation.

Anyone can register a .help domain, with no credential, industry or location test. The registry agreement carries no eligibility requirement at all, and the one clause that touches the subject works the other way, stopping the operator from limiting the extension to a single company and its affiliates.

That openness matters when you start searching, because the name you want may already belong to someone with no support site behind it. Almost every short dictionary word in .help is registered and a large share of them resolve to nothing, so plan on a two-word name built from your brand.

No, a .help domain is not on the HSTS preload list, so browsers do not force HTTPS on it the way they do for .app and .dev. Your pages still load over HTTPS on a Wix site and you still get a free SSL certificate, but the enforcement comes from your setup rather than from the extension itself.

For a support site that distinction changes very little day to day, since you would serve over HTTPS either way. It matters only if you were choosing .help specifically for a security guarantee baked into the extension, because that guarantee is not part of this one.

Yes, a .help domain works well as a second address pointing at a help section rather than a whole site. A long list of companies own their .help name and route it straight into an existing support portal, which keeps one set of content and gives staff and customers a short address to type or read aloud.

The other pattern is hosting the help content on the .help domain itself and leaving the main site where it is. Either way, keep both renewals on automatic payment, because losing the short address breaks every link, QR code and printed card that carried it.

A .help domain and a .support domain do the same job, and the choice comes down to the word your customers already use. Help is shorter and more conversational, and it is what most product interfaces put on the link; support reads more formal and turns up more often inside enterprise contracts.

The practical difference is availability. .support is a far smaller extension, so more good one-word names are still open in it, while .help is much larger and its short names are mostly gone. If a single-word address is what you are after, look at .support first.

A .help domain reads clearly to anyone who arrives from inside your product, because the link they clicked has already set the context. Where it needs more care is cold contact, since an address a customer meets for the first time in an email or a text message carries less familiarity than a .com they already know.

The answer is pairing rather than replacing. Keep your main domain for anything outbound and unsolicited, and use the .help address for the pages people reach deliberately when they are already looking for an answer.

A .help domain is commonly sold on a very low first-year price and renews at many times that figure, which is the first thing to check before you commit. The opening year is a promotion set by the seller, while the renewal is much closer to what the extension costs to hold every year after that.

So compare the renewal figure rather than the headline, and decide if you want the address for one campaign or for the long run. If it is going to carry your documentation links for years, budget at the renewal rate from the start.

Most short and generic .help names are registered, and a great many of them lead nowhere. The extension has been sold cheaply for years, which pulled in a large volume of speculative registrations, so common words tend to sit with resellers asking four and five figures or with owners who never built anything on them.

The registry also holds back several of the most obvious generics, which are registered but not pointed anywhere at all. That leaves brand-based names as the reliable route, and they are the better choice regardless, because a support address earns its keep when it carries your own name.