What Google Domains customers need to know about the Squarespace sale

Squarespace announced an agreement on June 15, 2023 to acquire the assets of the Google Domains business, which includes approximately 10 million registered domains. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2023.

The companies intend to transfer existing Google Domains customers to Squarespace domains, and Squarespace said the company will honor renewal pricing for at least 12 months following the completion of the transaction. Following the initial announcement, Google published a support page about the transition, and Squarespace shared details on the Squarespace Domains site.

If you’ve registered one or more of the 10 million domains affected by this sale, below are four key points you need to consider. Unfortunately, since Squarespace’s announcement on June 15th, Google Domains has yet to email current customers about the change as of June 21st, 2023.

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You will have a different domain registration vendor

Former Google Domains customers will become Squarespace customers; These customers must sign in to Squarespace to modify, add, or otherwise manage registered Domain Name System records. All future domain name renewals will be done through Squarespace.

Domain registration pricing likely to change in the long run

One significant change in the long term will likely be a change in the domain name registration price. In the initial announcement, Squarespace claimed it would honor renewal pricing for at least one year, which is helpful because Google Domains offers excellent value for the price.

picture a

To understand the potential changes, let’s review the listed fees for a hypothetical domain, exampletechrepublic, with each of the following variants to illustrate the price difference.

Customers of standard .com, .net, .org, and .dev domains can expect increased costs as shown in Figure A and the table above. Actual cost changes will vary based on your specific set of domain registrations. In an enterprise that may need to manage multiple domains (for example, multiple variants of each domain name for multiple brands), the cost change can be significant.

Expect Less Participation and More Promotion

Google Domains made it easy to add and configure Google properties like Google Workspace, Sites, Blogger, or Firebase, and also offered streamlined setup with partners, including Squarespace, Shopify, Bluehost, Wix, and Weebly. Once domain registration from Google Domains is transferred to Squarespace, some of these partner promotions will likely remain; However, according to the announcements, the streamlined setup of Google Workspaces will continue from the Squarespace domain. Customers of Squarespace domains can expect more promotion of Squarespace website building tools.

You may want to explore alternatives

The prudent course of action may be to do nothing: wait for the move, monitor the position and evaluate any future price changes. From what is known so far, if Google Domains customers do nothing, all registrations will move to Squarespace and pricing will remain stable for one year.

Hopefully, the timing of the transfer of registration will be planned so that Squarespace has time to make sure its systems are as robust as Google Domains. For example, historically, Squarespace’s website offering did not sell DNSSEC services (picture b below, right) and instead pointed customers to third-party providers, essentially putting the onus of proper technical configuration on Squarespace customers. In contrast, the configuration of DNSSEC in Google Domains was often enabled by default (picture b bottom left).

picture b

Alternatively, some Google Domains customers may prefer to go ahead and actively switch to a different registrar. You need to select a suitable registrar and then start the domain registration transfer process.

For example, a strong candidate might be a domain name registrar that offers Whois privacy, reasonable pricing, published names/profiles of key leadership, and organizational experience as a Google Workspaces reseller. Published profiles indicate a certain level of willingness on the part of people to accept responsibility for their business actions, while experience reselling workspaces increases the likelihood that support teams are familiar with Google’s systems. For this, you may also prefer the easy to configure DNSSEC option, as mentioned above. Namecheap.com meets all of these criteria and is worth looking into as an alternative.

If you have domains registered with Google Domains, are you planning to transfer your domains to Squarespace or are you planning to move them to another domain name registrar? If the latter, which domain name registrar have you chosen? Why? Mention or message me at Mastodon (@avolber) to let me know what your plans are as a result of the sale.