Beyond .com: which domain zones WordPress sites actually use

Almost every guide about domains says the same thing: take a .com if you can, otherwise your country code. The catalogue lets us check that advice against what 2 007 974 live WordPress sites actually use.

Every number below comes from the same place: we read the domain of each site in the collection and take its last label. Sites flagged as adult and sites we could not verify are excluded, so this is the shape of an ordinary WordPress web.

One zone holds more than half the web

Out of 2 007 974 sites, 1 170 999 sit in .com alone. Nothing else comes close.

Country zones beat .org and .net together

The interesting part is second place. Country code zones are not a niche: 584 419 sites, more than .org and .net combined. And they are not spread evenly — a handful of countries dominate.

Germany alone has more WordPress sites than .org and .net have together in some markets. A national zone is not a fallback for people who could not get a .com — for a large share of the web it is the first choice.

The land rush that never happened

Between 2014 and 2016 hundreds of new generic zones went on sale — .xyz, .club, .online, .site, .shop, .agency, .photography, hundreds more. The idea was that a dentist could have .dentist instead of a made-up word.

Across the whole catalogue, every new generic zone together holds 2 725 sites. That is 0.14% of the WordPress web — roughly one site in seven hundred.

The leader, .xyz, has 143 sites. For comparison, .cat — the Catalan cultural zone, one of the smallest communities in Europe — has 1 077. A single cultural zone beats the entire new generation of generic domains seven times over.

Curiosities worth knowing

.cat, 1 077 sites. Restricted to the Catalan language and culture, verified by the registry. It is larger than every new generic zone combined, and larger than most country zones.

.рф, 974 sites. The Cyrillic version of .ru, stored internationally as xn--p1ai. Nearly a thousand WordPress sites use a domain that is not written in Latin letters at all.

.eus, .tokyo, .asia. The Basque zone has 59 sites, Tokyo 49, Asia 442. Language and city zones exist, and they are small but real.

.info, 20 155. The oldest challenger to .com still holds its ground — it is the fourth largest zone overall, ahead of any country except Germany and Russia.

.eu, 11 565. Not a country but a union, and it behaves like a mid-sized country zone.

What this means if you are choosing a domain

If you want the default: .com. More than half the web is there, and every registrar, mail provider and customer recognises it without a second thought.

If you serve one country: take the country zone. Germany, Poland, Italy, Brazil — local zones hold a third of all WordPress sites, and local search engines treat them as a signal.

If you want a memorable word: a new generic zone will not hurt you technically, but do not expect familiarity. Only 2 725 sites in this catalogue use one — your visitors will have seen it far less often than a .com.

How this is measured

The zone is taken from the site’s own domain name, not from any service. Sites that are inactive, unverified or flagged as adult are excluded. A site running on a subdomain is counted under its real zone, so shop.example.de counts towards .de, not towards a fictional .example zone.

You can browse any zone, with the sites in it, from the domain zone list.