Is a custom domain worth it for your link-in-bio?
It costs around 10-15 a year and half an hour of setup. Sometimes it is clearly worth it and sometimes it changes nothing. Here are both situations.
Almost every link-in-bio tool lets you use your own domain: yourname.com
instead of thetool.com/yourname. It usually sits behind a paid plan, and it is
usually sold as obviously better.
It isn’t always. It depends on what you do with that link.
What you actually gain
The link becomes yours, not the tool’s. This is the strong argument, and the one mentioned least. The day you switch tools — and people do — a custom domain means you point it somewhere else and every link you have ever handed out keeps working: the bio, old messages, whatever other people shared, anything printed.
Without one, switching tools means all of that breaks at the same moment, and there is no fix except going through every place one by one.
People read your name. Someone who sees yourname.com in your bio reads
you. Someone who sees sometool.com/yourname reads the name of a company they
do not know. If you are selling something, that difference is real.
What other people do stops splashing on you. A shared domain is used by thousands of people, and platforms evaluate whole domains, not individual pages. If that domain accumulates signals because of what others publish, it affects you without you having done anything. With your own domain the reputation is yours — for better and for worse.
What it costs
Money: not much. A .com runs about 10-15 a year. A .link, .bio or
similar can be cheaper the first year and pricier afterwards — check the renewal
price, not the signup one.
Time: half an hour, and not always. You have to touch your domain’s DNS. If you bought the domain today and have never touched a DNS record, between working out what a CNAME is and waiting for it to propagate, an afternoon can go.
One technical detail that catches people out: the bare domain
(yourname.com, with nothing in front) is harder to set up than a subdomain
(links.yourname.com), because of how DNS works. Some providers handle it for
you and some do not allow it at all. If yours doesn’t, the sensible move is a
subdomain, which works just as well.
When it does NOT pay off
This is where almost nobody is straight with you, so:
If you are just starting. If you are still working out what you sell and to whom, a custom domain will not bring you one extra customer. It is money and time that go further elsewhere. You can add it later and lose nothing.
If you are not selling anything. If your link just points at your other socials, the trust advantage does not apply: nobody hesitates before tapping through to your TikTok.
If you will never switch tools. The strongest argument is portability. If you do not value it, the main reason falls away.
A myth worth killing
It does not improve your Google rankings. It gets sold as though it has an SEO effect, and it does not, for a simple reason: your link-in-bio page should not be in Google anyway.
That page offers nothing to someone searching — it is a menu of links with no content of its own — and many serious tools explicitly mark it not to be indexed, ours included. Rankings are won by your real website, if you have one, not by your links page.
Deciding it in two questions
- Do you sell anything through that link? If not, wait.
- Would it hurt if every link you have handed out stopped working? If yes, do it now — the sooner you do, the fewer links are out there with the old address.
If you answered no to both, there is nothing wrong with leaving it for later. It can be added at any point, and the work is the same today as in six months.