German TLD for international Website a bad ide?

Hello,

I am running a german tech-Website with the top-level-Domain ".de"

As I want to go international is it a bad idea to use the same domain name sitename.de/en --> English Folder

or should I start a new website with sitename.com or sitename.net

Do you think that the users will click less on my website cause it is ".de"?

Thanks in advance,
Hansi

It's not about less clicks (CTR), if you have a look at the Google search console, you will recognize that you can't target a country with the .de domain. All ccTLDs (country specific domains), except a few odd ones treated as generic domains by Google, automatically target the specific country they are from. Means, a .de will only rank well in Google.de, if you add /en/ it will rank well for english language queries from Germany, but not for international (US/UK/whatever) queries.

So, you are basically limiting yourself to Germany with the .de. Compare your rankings to Google.at and Google.ch, you probably see weaker sites outranking you, although the language is the same. Same for .co.uk domains, some strong ones may appear for US searchers, but they got most visibility in Google.co.uk.

Go for the generic .com, hreflang works perfect fine across domains and with a gTLD. For the .com, you can later add eg /fr/ so you don't require a new domain for each country/language. .de for your home market, .com for the rest.

If you want to rank your website in your country it should be fine you can also run a check from Google and see what domains are more competitive from your perspective.