A year ago, Google abruptly announced it had sold its domain registrar business to Squarespace, and it appears things aren’t going well, since data shows new registrations are down since the takeover.
New numbers from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) show that combined new registrations of .com domains from Google Domains and Squarespace dropped about 25% the month after Google stopped selling new domains. In August 2023, right before Google Domains ended sales, over 250,000 new .com domains were registered between the two companies. But in September, after the change, that number fell sharply to just under 190,000 new registrations.
This big drop occurred immediately after Google Domains shut down its sales in September 2023. Google has been a popular option for people to register websites ending in .com for many years. But when it suddenly stopped allowing new registrations and transferred all its domain customers to Squarespace, many potential customers seemed to go elsewhere. Other domain companies like WordPress even offered existing Google Domains users free services to switch over.
The numbers since then are unclear, as more up-to-date data is not publicly available yet. But this first month after the ownership change saw a significant decline. It raises questions about whether Squarespace has been able to attract and keep as many new domain customers as Google once did. Only time will tell if registration numbers will continue falling or eventually recover under the new ownership. For now, the sale of Google’s domain business to Squarespace looks to have led directly to fewer people registering new websites in the critical .com space.
