Earlier this year the Irish Domain Registry published their .ie Domain Profile Report 2023. It’s their annual look back at the previous year to see how the Irish domains market performed and what trends or patterns there were.
The full report runs to some 14 pages, so we thought it might be useful to summarise the key points and interesting takeaways.
New domain registrations
2023 saw 48,689 new .ie domains registered, bringing the total number to 328,245. Compared to 2022, this represents a 0.34% increase in new registrations, but a 0.31% reduction in the total number. Despite this slight reduction in number, the long-term picture is encouraging, as the .ie database has grown by 16.8% since 2019.
Covid-era domains
The period of the Covid pandemic caused people to realise they needed to register a domain to be found online. But now that the pandemic is over, what is the state of those domains? Interestingly, the Registry report that around 50% of domains registered during that period have been deleted due to non-renewal. This could indicate that the domain owners have now shifted back to their pre-Covid style of operating or that their original intention of taking their enterprise online never actually came to fruition.
Most popular extensions
The .ie domain extension accounts for 54.3% of all domains in Ireland, clearly making it the island’s domain of choice. Of these, 90% were registered to an owner located within Ireland. The remaining 10% were registered outside Ireland, with Great Britain, the US and Germany being the top three international countries.
After .ie, the second most popular extension registered last year was .com, representing 29.3% of all domains in Ireland.
Most used Content Management System (CMS)
In 2023, 59% of all .ie domains were using a CMS to manage their website. Of these, the most popular was WordPress, being used by 75.24% of CMS users. This was followed by Wix, at 10.14%, and Squarespace, at 5.68%.
Interestingly, just 11.43% of all .ie domains have e-Commerce functionality.
View the Full Report
In this blog post we’ve summarised some of the statistics that we thought were interesting, but there is more to read in the full report. This includes nuggets such as the most popular keywords used within domains and which specific Irish counties registered the most domains.
Why not give it a read? You’ll find it on the website of the Irish Domain Registry.
