Should a business in Lebanon use .com or .com.lb?

The ending of a web address, which people also call the domain extension, tells visitors and search engines which country a site mainly serves. That is almost all it does. It does not decide who can visit the site, what you can sell or how fast the page opens. A shop on .com.lb takes orders from anywhere, and a clinic on .com can serve one neighbourhood of Beirut.

Some endings are general, like .com, and anyone anywhere can register one. Others belong to a single country. Lebanon’s is .lb, and a business takes it as .com.lb.

Take .com.lb when all three of these are true:

• Almost everyone you sell to is in Lebanon, and they find you by searching from Lebanon.
• The business is registered in Lebanon, and you have the papers to prove it.
• You have no plan to sell outside Lebanon in the next few years.

That describes a clinic in Jdeideh, a shop in Sidon or a law firm in Achrafieh. For them the Lebanese ending tells a local customer at a glance that the business is local too.

If any one of those three is not true, use .com. That covers more businesses than most owners expect.

A Beirut restaurant with a following in the diaspora. A design studio taking clients in the Gulf. A family trading business with buyers in West Africa. Each sells to people who are not in Lebanon on the day they decide to buy. A country ending names one country, and these customers are in another, so it narrows the business in front of exactly the customer it has just found.

A .com also wins when you have not settled on a market, when the business is registered outside Lebanon, or when you may want to sell the business one day without a country attached to its address. It has no eligibility rules, so there is nothing to prove before it goes live.

If you cannot decide, take the .com and add .com.lb later if the business needs it. The new address simply forwards to the old one, and nothing already printed changes. The other direction is harder: moving your main address from .com.lb to .com means changing every business card, sign, listing and link that carries the old one.

A .com.lb is for a legally registered business. The registry’s published requirements for .com.lb, in place since February 2021, ask for:

• The registry’s own application form, the LBDR-A, filled in and signed.
• One supporting document: a current commercial circular, a trademark certificate, or the registration papers of a private practice.
• A Lebanese postal address for the business.

You do not apply to the registry yourself. You apply through one of its accredited registrars, the companies allowed to sell .lb addresses, and the registrar checks your papers before passing them on. Once the application is approved, the registry emails you to confirm your details and accept its policy, and only then does the address go live. Expect it to take longer than a .com: the check is the point.

Two rules catch people out. The registry’s policy says it does not currently offer addresses ending in plain .lb, and that registration for private individuals is not supported. A freelancer without a registered business or practice cannot take a .com.lb in their own name.

The price is set by the registrar. Since its 2021 policy update, the registry has charged registrars a fee in US dollars, which they pass on with their own charge added, so compare more than one before you choose.

The body in charge has also changed. In 2024, as IANA’s report on the transfer records, the management of .lb moved to Internet Society Lebanon after nearly thirty years with a manager at the American University of Beirut. A guide that still names the university was written before the change.

Not in the way people usually mean. Google’s guide to multi-regional sites calls a country ending a strong signal that a site is meant for one country. That is what it is: a signal about who the site is for. It does not lift a page above better pages, and it does nothing for a page that does not answer what someone searched.

The same guide lists the other signals Google reads alongside the ending: the language of the page, a local address and phone number, the local currency, links from other local sites and the business’s Google Business Profile. A .com that has those can be understood as serving Lebanon just as well.

If your business is not appearing at all, the ending is not where to look first. Why your website is not showing on Google goes through the checks that usually find the cause.

Sometimes. Keeping both and pointing them at one site is common, and it works, but it does not do what most owners expect.

Two addresses do not double your reach. The second one forwards anyone who types it to the first, with a permanent redirect that tells search engines which address is the real one, and it brings no visitors of its own. Register it to stop someone else taking your name, or so a customer who types it out of habit lands in the right place.

Pick one address for the address bar, your business cards and your Google Business Profile, and redirect the other to it. Two separate sites at two addresses compete with each other in search.

This matters more than the ending. Strictly, registering an address gives you the right to use it for as long as you renew it, which the Lebanese registry’s policy states in as many words. Who controls that right is decided by the registrant, the name the address is registered to.

If a developer or a hosting company registered it in their own name, the ending will not help you on the day you want to move, change who builds the site or sell the business. Who owns your website if your designer disappears walks through how to check, and what can still be recovered if the answer is not yours.

Every site we build comes with one web address free for the first year, a .com, .net or .co, registered in your name from the start. The code and the hosting account move into your name at handover, as part of how we build a website from scratch.