These three terms get used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. A website is the actual content: pages, images, code, sitting on a server somewhere. A domain name is the human-readable address you register, like yourbusiness.com, that points visitors to that server. A URL is a full path to one specific resource, like https://yourbusiness.com/about. You need a domain to give your website an address, but the domain itself is not the website; it's the sign pointing at it.
Website: the actual thing
A website is a collection of files, HTML pages, images, scripts, a database if it's dynamic, stored on a hosting server. Without a domain, a website still exists and is technically reachable by its server's IP address, but nobody remembers a string of numbers. Hosting is what keeps those files online and serving requests; the domain is what makes them findable by name.
This is also why "buying a domain" and "getting a website" are two separate purchases. Plenty of people register a domain years before they build anything on it, and plenty of people build a site on a temporary address (a subdomain, a preview link) before they ever attach a real domain to it.
Domain name: the address you register
A domain name is a registration you own for a set period, renewable annually (or in multi-year blocks), through a registrar. It doesn't come with hosting built in. Once you have both a domain and hosting, you connect them by pointing the domain's DNS at your hosting account. If you already own a domain elsewhere and want to use it with new hosting, see can I use a domain I already own? for the two ways to do that: point DNS without transferring, or transfer the registration in fully.
Pointing DNS is generally done by changing the domain's nameservers to your host's. For the exact steps at the most common registrars, see changing nameservers at GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Cloudflare.
A domain name has a structure worth knowing: the part after the last dot (.com, .net, .dev) is the top-level domain (TLD), the part before it is the second-level domain (your actual brand name), and anything in front of that, like www or blog, is a subdomain. www.yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com are technically different hostnames under the same domain; many site owners configure one to redirect to the other so visitors reach the same site either way.
URL: one specific location
A URL (uniform resource locator) is the full address to a single page or file, not the whole site. It's built from several parts stacked together:
- Scheme:
https://, telling the browser to use an encrypted connection. - Host: the domain or subdomain, like
www.yourbusiness.com. - Path: what comes after the domain, like
/aboutor/blog/post-title, identifying the specific page. - Query string: optional parameters after a
?, like?ref=email, often used for tracking or filtering.
So yourbusiness.com is a domain. https://yourbusiness.com/contact is a URL, one address among potentially thousands that all live under that same domain. Every page on your site has its own URL, but they all share the same domain name.
How the pieces connect behind the scenes
When someone types your domain into a browser, DNS translates it into the IP address of the server hosting your files, then the server returns the specific page requested by the URL's path. This is why DNS records matter so much: an A record maps your root domain to your server's IP, and other record types handle things like email routing (MX) and pointing other hosts (CNAME). For a full breakdown of what each record type does, see DNS record types explained, and for where to actually edit them on your account, see DNS records and how to manage them.
Get the vocabulary straight and troubleshooting gets easier too. "My website is down" could mean the server is unreachable, the domain's DNS is misconfigured, or a single URL is returning an error while the rest of the site works fine. Knowing which layer you're actually dealing with narrows down where to look first.