How to get the domain name from a URL in JavaScript

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to get the domain name from a URL using JavaScript.

Please note if you require the domain name from the current page being viewed you can simply use window.location.hostname. This tutorial is for those that want to extract the domain from a URL provided in a data source.

First let’s create a string with our URL:

const url = "https://www.example.com/blog?search=hello&world";
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Next we create a URL object using the new URL() constructor:

let domain = (new URL(url));
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

This constructor is part of the browser URL API. It allows us to create a URL object from a string similar to the object created using window.location. With the object created we can access the hostname property which returns a string containing the domain name:

domain = domain.hostname;
console.log(domain); //www.example.com
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

If you require a naked domain the www can be removed using the replace() method.

domain = domain.hostname.replace('www.','');
console.log(domain); //example.com
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The URL API is currently supported by all modern browsers with a polyfill available for IE.