Asking whether you’ve got a strategy for your domains is like asking if you have a strategy for your knives and forks. You need them to eat, probably chose ones you liked (or at least didn’t hate) and haven’t given them much thought since. Other than maybe wondering why you don’t have the same number of knives as you do forks anymore. Preferences, sure. Need, yes. Strategy, though? Probably not.

Domains are similar. Every business with a web presence has likely picked up some number of domains. They’re things you purchase as and when you need them, and then likely keep until you forget they exist, or they get lost in an IT overhaul. There’s no strategy behind it.

But there should be.

Domains are not background noise

Every domain your organization owns is infrastructure carrying customers, revenue, email and reputation. A domain that fails, does so in front of the people you were trying to sell something to. One that is hacked, goes out using your name and your brand to swindle your customers.

That’s not an argument for spending more on domains, though. It is one for knowing what you have, why you have it, and who is responsible when it breaks. For having a strategy.

Why it got complicated

Domain management used to be simpler. Just a renewal calendar you checked once a year.

But then organizations went global, which brought country-code domains, local registry rules and local registrant requirements. They acquired other organizations and inherited portfolios spread across registrars nobody had a login for. They launched more products, sub-brands and campaign sites than any one team could track. And all the while the threat landscape industrialized, with automated registration of lookalike domains running at a scale that makes manual checking pointless.

This then changed the technical asks. SSL certificate lifetimes are getting shorter to combat the threats, which means the renewal work multiplies even if your portfolio doesn’t. More to do, more often, with the same team.

Why reacting doesn’t work

When you have that many moving parts, coming that fast, keeping a handle on it requires a lot more than just matching effort, because you’ll still just be reacting to each problem as it comes up. You need a plan.

Because the time you waste working out what the problems are, is time small problems become big ones.

Take ownership fragmentation, like when you end up with a domain sitting forgotten in a former contractor’s personal account. It’s fine until it isn’t renewed, and then working out who owns it, how to contact them, and what details are needed to get your website back online can be catastrophic. It’s something that’s easy to handle ahead of time, but not in the moment.

The same fragmentation leads to security issues, missed certificate renewals, and missing local registry rules. All end in one of your customers being told by their browser that your website is unsafe, at best, or feeding their account details to a hacker at worst.

Reacting is harder, with worse outcomes. And it’s more expensive even when things go right. Because if you’re just waiting for something to break, you’ll keep spending renewal fees on hundreds of domains nobody can justify and nobody dares delete.

The building blocks of a future-proof strategy

So, if you are not reacting to each problem as it lands, what are you doing instead? Getting ahead of them. And getting ahead starts by knowing what’s yours.

You work out what you have. Every domain, who owns it, what it is for, which certificate sits on it, and when the domain and the certificate each run out. That is the whole first step. No tooling, no budget cycle, just an accurate list of your entire domain portfolio.

The rest of a domain strategy is the work of keeping that list accurate.

Centralize the portfolio, using one registrar and one system of record, rather than a patchwork of accounts and departmental workarounds. Doing this means that your inventory updates itself, instead of being reassembled by hand every quarter. And that’s most of the value of consolidated portfolio management. It’s not fancy, but it works.

Then set governance policy centrally. Who can register, what naming rules apply, which security standards are mandatory, and what happens to a domain when a product retires. This stops you having to do it all again in two years’ time.

Security is then applied by priority rather than evenly. Your inventory tells you which names carry revenue, email and customer logins. And those domains get registry lock, multi-factor authentication and resilient DNS. The rest get proportionate attention, or get let go.

Finally, there’s looking beyond your own portfolio. Your strategy has to account for domains you do not own. Monitoring for lookalikes and infringing registrations, with a route to takedown when you find them, is part of the same job. And helps you stay ahead of the bad actors.

Automation, and what it gets you

Your strategy is only as good as the day-to-day work that keeps it true, and most of that work is repetitive, data-driven and easy to miss. Which makes it exactly the kind of work that should not depend on a person.

Take certificate lifecycle management. Renewals are becoming more frequent, they are time-critical, and the consequence of missing one is public. An API-driven approach, such as BrandShelter’s SSL API, handles issuance, validation and renewal in the background.

The same logic applies across the portfolio. Automated renewals, automated monitoring alerts, automated reporting for whoever signs off the budget. Each one removes a step that currently depends on a specific person remembering a specific thing on a specific day.

Start with what you have

While you may not need a strategy for your kitchen cutlery, you do for your domain portfolio.

Thankfully, implementing a future-proof domain strategy is building yourself a capability that pays back every time the business does something new: whether a new market, brand or acquisition. At least, it will if you maintain it with the same rigor with which you built it.

If your portfolio currently lives across several registrars and one increasingly heroic spreadsheet, that is the thing to fix first. Talk to us about corporate domain management and we will help you get it into one place.

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