Naming a blog feels like a small decision and ends up being one of the most consequential ones you’ll make. The name shows up in your domain, your branding, your social handles, your email list, every backlink, and every share. Changing it later is possible but genuinely painful: lost SEO, lost recognition, and hours of cleanup work. It’s worth getting close to right the first time around.

This post is the test for whether a candidate name will still feel right two years from now, not just today.

Blogger writing potential blog names on a whiteboard and crossing some out

The five tests every name should pass

1. Can you say it out loud without spelling it?

Call this the “podcast test.” Imagine telling someone the name of your blog at a coffee shop. Do they immediately ask you to spell it? If the answer is yes, the name is probably too cute for its own good. Names with intentional misspellings, dropped vowels, or unusual punctuation become a real liability the moment your blog grows beyond people who arrive purely through search.

2. Is the .com available?

You can technically use any TLD, but .com is still the default people type without thinking about it. If yourblog.com is taken and you settle for yourblog.net, you’ll permanently lose readers who guess the .com and land on someone else’s site instead. Try variations until you land on one with the .com genuinely free.

Tools like Namecheap or Google Domains make this check quick and painless.

3. Is it broad enough to grow?

A name like “VeganBrunchRecipes.com” pins you to one narrow topic forever. If you eventually want to write about lunch, dinner, or non-vegan food, the name actively fights you every time. Pick a name with room to evolve instead. “PlantPlate” gives you all of food. “EveryGreenMeal” gives you all of food too. “VeganBrunchRecipes” gives you, specifically, vegan brunch recipes and nothing else.

4. Is it dateless?

“2024Blogger.com” was a perfectly reasonable name in 2024. It reads as a tombstone by 2026. Avoid years, current trends, and current technologies inside the name itself. A good name should still feel current five years from now, not just this quarter.

5. Are the social handles available?

Check Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube before you commit to anything. If yourblog.com is free but @yourblog is already taken on every platform, you’ll end up juggling inconsistent handles indefinitely. Look for a name where at least 2 to 3 of the main social platforms have a matching handle genuinely available.

Quick tip: Run your top candidate through the USPTO trademark database before you register anything. A name being available as a domain doesn’t mean it’s safe to build a brand around, and a conflict discovered after launch is far more expensive to fix.
Domain and social handle availability checks for a potential blog name

The patterns that work

Across thousands of successful blogs, a small number of naming patterns keep repeating.

Two-word compounds

Smitten Kitchen, Bon Appetit, The Pioneer Woman, Nerd Fitness, Minimal Mag. Two words, easy to remember, broad enough to grow with the blog. This is the most common pattern among successful blogs by a wide margin.

A name plus a category word

Pinch of Yum, The Penny Hoarder, A Cup of Jo. A simple frame that signals what the blog is about while still sounding human rather than corporate.

Your own name (or a play on it)

If you’re building a personal brand or a portfolio-style blog, your own name is a genuinely strong choice. It’s unique, it’s evergreen, and you’ll never outgrow it. The downsides are that it’s harder to sell later and generally less discoverable than a topical name would be.

A short, made-up word

Coined names like Bustle, Mashable, or Goop work because they’re memorable and easy to trademark cleanly. They’re hard to land on, but genuinely powerful once you do.

The patterns to avoid

  • Names that require explanation. If the pun only lands once you explain it, it doesn’t really land.
  • Numbers spelled out or numeric. “Top10X” versus “TopTenX” creates confusion every single time someone tries to type it.
  • Hyphens and dashes. “my-blog.com” reads as cheap and gets typed wrong constantly by people trying to find you.
  • Trendy suffixes. “ly” endings, “.io” domains for non-tech blogs, and similar choices date extremely fast.
  • Names that copy a bigger brand. Trademark issues, copycat perception, and search confusion all stack against you at once.
  • Names that lock you to one platform. “InstagramFoodie” works fine right up until you outgrow Instagram itself.

The naming process

A workflow that produces good names without burning an entire week on it:

  1. Write 50 candidate names in one sitting. Don’t filter as you go. Pun names, descriptive names, made-up words, two-word compounds, your own name plus something else. All of it belongs on the list.
  2. Cross off any that fail the say-out-loud test.
  3. Check .com availability for the survivors. Most will already be gone, and that’s completely fine.
  4. Check social handles for the few names that make it through.
  5. Sleep on the final three. One will feel right the next morning. The other two will feel slightly off in a way you can’t quite name.
  6. Register the domain and the social handles the same day. Don’t sit on it for a week. Names you genuinely love get squatted surprisingly fast.

WordPress.org’s own lesson on choosing a domain name covers similar ground if you want a second framework to cross-check candidates against.

The “what if I outgrow it” question

Some bloggers obsess over picking a name that will survive every possible evolution of the blog. This is over-engineering the problem. You will probably rebrand someday if your blog grows large enough, and that’s genuinely fine. What you actually want is a name that survives the next two to three years of consistent writing. Don’t pick a name so safe and generic that it has no personality left in it. Pick a name with real character and accept that you’ll revisit it later if you truly outgrow it.

Naming is step one of a longer setup

Good blog names are short, sayable, available as a .com, broad enough to grow, and not pinned to a current year or platform. The best ones carry personality without needing an explanation. Spend a week on this and lock it down. Don’t spend three months on it. A decent name shipped beats a perfect name agonized over indefinitely.

Once the name is settled, the next questions are domain registration, hosting, and theme, roughly in that order. Our guide on domain, hosting, and theme decisions walks through that sequence in detail, and when you get to the theme step, Aurora is built specifically for blogs that need their homepage, archives, and single posts to feel intentional from day one rather than assembled from a generic template. Our guide on how to choose a WordPress blog theme covers that decision in more depth.