One thing I didn’t know before building my first website is that every site is made up of two parts. The first is the content itself, which consists of text, images, and other files that combine to show you what the author published. This blog post is an example of my website’s content, and it comes to you from my web host, Squarespace.
The other key element of a website is its domain name (sometimes just called a domain). That’s the address you type into your browser to get to the content. These usually end in .com, .net, .co.uk, or something similar. For the blog, it’s devondundee.com. In order for a website to be accessible, it needs both content and a domain name.
For years, I’ve purchased all of my domain names through Google Domains. It’s the cheapest option I’ve found, and it comes with a bunch of great features like private registration and email forwarding that other providers charge extra for. Domains is the only Google service that I use other than YouTube, and I’ve never loved running my website through them, but it’s always been the best solution for me.
That is, until Google recently announced that they would be shutting down the service for good and selling their domain name business to none other than Squarespace. I was actually excited by this news. I’ve been hosting websites on Squarespace for eight years years and have had an amazing experience with the company. Plus, this is an opportunity to consolidate all of my web services, both hosting and domain names, into one central place.
So rather than wait around for Google and Squarespace to move my domains for me, I took the initiative and started transitioning them myself. Moving a domain name from one provider to another is a simple process that I’ve done before. But I had never bought one from Squarespace before, and there are some differences between the way the two companies handle them, so I was curious to see how it would go.
It was mostly a smooth experience, but there were a couple of bumps along the way. I started with the domain name for my dad’s company, where I help manage the website. I purchased a year of service for the domain on Squarespace, then I went to Google to approve the transfer. Within a few minutes, everything had moved over.
There was only one problem. I was using Google’s email forwarding feature for that domain, and Squarespace doesn’t currently offer anything equivalent. So all emails being sent to an address at that domain name were being rejected. I ended up solving this by connecting the website to Apple’s iCloud+ service for custom email domains. It’s a better solution anyway, but not as simple as basic email forwarding.
Squarespace has promised to offer “feature continuity” to Google Domains customers when they make the transition this fall, so I’m hopeful that they’ll add an email forwarding option soon. But if they don’t, I imagine a lot of customers will be upset to lose access to it. It’s great to be able to receive emails at a custom domain name without paying extra or going through any setup. Squarespace, and every other domain name provider, should include this feature with every purchase.
I had quite a bit more trouble moving my family website’s domain name to Squarespace. The transfer itself was fine, but once the domain showed up in my Squarespace account, it was listed as insecure. Every time someone visited dundee.me, they were shown a message that the site was potentially malicious. This wasn’t great, especially since it was my primary way of linking people to our baby registry in days leading up to the baby shower.
After two sessions with customer support, my issue was escalated to a senior product specialist who was able to pinpoint the problem. There was a setting in my domain’s backend that I didn’t have access to called DNSSEC that was preventing Squarespace from securing my website. The specialist was able to get the setting changed and fix the security issue, but it wasn’t a quick process.
All in all, my website was insecure—and thus more difficult to access—for a week while all of this was being worked out. It was okay in this instance because my family website doesn’t get a lot of traffic and isn’t something I rely on to make a living, but I can imagine other scenarios where this would be devastating. Squarespace needs to fix whatever went wrong with my domain transfer before moving ten million other domains over later this year.
My final domain transfer, the one for this website, was the easiest of them all. It took less than ten minutes and everything moved over perfectly except for a couple of subdomains (like about.devondundee.com) that I had to recreate. I would have preferred if the subdomains had transferred automatically, but that’s a minor quibble for my use case.
Squarespace still has a few bugs to work out in the transfer process before they’re ready to move over thousands of Google Domains customers. I’m confident that they will. Personally, I’m happy that I’m now able to manage all of my websites in one place and to do so while working with a company that I’m happy to support.
