What Squarespace Got When It Bought Google Domains
In June 2023, Google announced that it would shut down Google Domains and migrate the customer base to Squarespace. The acquisition included the domain registration product, the existing customer database, and the registration relationships with the underlying TLD registries — but not Google's broader DNS infrastructure or the integration with Google Workspace email. Squarespace (the website-builder company headquartered in New York) inherited a registrar product as a side feature of its primary website-building business, with the migration creating an instant millions-of-customers domain-registrar arm of a company that had not previously been one.
What the 2023 Migration Actually Meant
For Google Domains customers, the migration was not optional. Customers received notification that their registrations were being transferred to Squarespace on a specific date, with the option to transfer to a different registrar before that date if they preferred. Customers who didn't actively transfer found their domains under Squarespace's management on the migration date — a meaningful change in operational responsibility, since Squarespace's domain management interface, customer support, and pricing structure differ from what Google Domains customers were accustomed to. The migration was generally smooth on the technical level, but the customer-relationship continuity was broken in a way that produced visible online frustration in the months after.
Pricing After the Google Era
At $14.00 for a .com registration with $20.00 renewal, Squarespace's pricing reflects the website-builder economics of its parent business rather than the lean wholesale-style pricing Google Domains was known for. The 437 TLDs supported skew toward the popular gTLDs and major ccTLDs; the cheapest entry point is .art at $4.00. For customers who were happy with Google Domains' pricing and want similar economics, Cloudflare is the closest current match (wholesale-cost pricing, technical-leaning audience). For customers who use Squarespace's website-builder product and want consolidated billing, the integrated pricing makes sense; for everyone else, the registrar pricing alone doesn't justify staying.
When to Stay, When to Transfer
For customers actively building or running a website on Squarespace's builder platform, keeping the domain at Squarespace produces real coordination benefits: DNS records, SSL certificates, and email forwarding all manage from a single dashboard, and the integration is genuinely tight. For customers who only had a domain at Google Domains and don't use Squarespace's builder, the registrar relationship is now a vestigial connection to a service the customer didn't choose. Transferring out to Hover, Porkbun, or NameSilo for a flat-pricing relationship the customer actively chooses produces both lower per-domain cost and registration mechanics designed for domain customers rather than website-builder customers. Our comparison tool shows the price gap, but the more important variable is whether the website-builder integration is something the customer values.