Enlarge / These Corporate Memphis folks are going to have to look elsewhere soon to get their own domain, unless they’re good with Squarespace. (credit: Google)
Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduated out of beta, Google is “winding down following a transition period,” as part of “efforts to sharpen our focus.” That’s corporate-ese for “We need to keep cost-cutting, so we’re selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace.”
As we noted when it fully launched, Google Domains wasn’t the cheapest registrar you could find, but it had a great interface, offered more than 300 different domain endings (now including, controversially, .mov and .zip), and its upkeep fees were a flat $12 per year, without add-on charges like WHOIS privacy or DNSSEC.
Google Domains tied into many other Google products, including Gmail, Workspace, Cloud, Ads, and more. But there wasn’t really an engine for making a website, the thing you see when you visit the domain. Domains offered quick hook-ups to services like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace. Now the last of those is set to take the whole business over, along with the roughly 10 million domains and the millions of customers behind them.