A brief overview of the .com top-level domain

The domain extension .com is undoubtedly the largest and most well-known top-level domain (TLD) on the web. Operated by Verisign, the same company that runs .net, .com’s history dates back to the early days of the internet. It was one of the original TLDs established in 1985, along with .gov, .edu, .mil, .org, .net, and .arpa. It quickly became the most popular TLD due to its association with commerce and companies, most notably during the late 1990s, as businesses rushed to establish an online presence. Solidified by its namesake relation to the dot-com boom—and subsequent dot-com bubble burst as many internet-based companies collapsed in the early 2000s—.com has since become synonymous with the internet itself.

Currently, the .com TLD remains the most widely used and recognized domain extension globally. It continues to be the preferred TLD for many businesses, startups, and individuals seeking to establish a strong online presence. And, despite the introduction of numerous new gTLDs in recent years, it retains its dominance and prestige. 

But what can we learn about the internet from just this one TLD? As it turns out, plenty: the global prevalence of .com means it captures a rather interesting snapshot of the total web in comparison, giving us a glimpse into the hosting, management, technical, and content details of the online world. Time to dive in and explore what this means!

Returned responses and website types

We love details, so let’s take a deeper look at the .com zone file—the text file that contains mappings between all currently registered domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. As of August 2024, there are just over 158 million registered domains in the .com zone file. In Figure 2, we see that active, available websites make up 50% of those registrations, and the remaining 50% are redirects, return an error response, or deny access to crawlers. 

Forty percent of these active websites are placeholders, 25% are business, and 6% are e-commerce websites, while the remainder comprises content pages, blogs, or framed websites. To put these numbers into context, we created a comparison set of 100,000 randomly selected active websites that are not .com. Can this comparison set show whether .com reflects overall web trends, given its global appeal and size? The random sample is made up of 65% country code TLDs, 19% generic TLDs, 16% new generic TLDs, and less than 1% sponsored TLDs. Our dataset here is made up of 32% of business and 6% e-commerce websites, though the number of placeholders is lower, at only 33%. The e-commerce trends are comparable, but .com is made up of overall more placeholders and fewer business websites. This is surprising since we think of .com as the commerce-focused TLD, but it seems like businesses overall prefer local (ccTLD) or themed new gTLDs.

Where are .com domains hosted?

The vast majority of .com domains are hosted in the USA, followed by Germany and Canada (see Figure 2). However, .com domains are hosted all over the world, from Zimbabwe to Monaco and Turkmenistan— basically every country hosts at least a few .com domains.

Those top three hosting countries are reflected in the global data, too: the US, Germany, and Canada host the most websites regardless of TLD, showing the broad appeal and impact of .com as it reflects global trends so closely. In our comparative sample, the US and Germany also rank at top two, with 41% and 14% percent respectively. Ranks 3, 4, and 5 go to France, the Netherlands, and Russia. These results aren’t unexpected, given the large proportion of ccTLDs in the comparison group.

Content management systems and social media

Next, let’s take a look at some website statistics: if we’re seeing that .com reflects overall web trends, then choice of content management system (CMS) is no exception. WordPress is the most commonly used CMS among .com websites, with 54% of them built with WordPress. WIX (12.6%) and Squarespace (10.7%) rank second and third among .com’s CMS providers. With some percentage point differences, these top three also dominate in our comparison sample, with WordPress at 66%, WIX at 7.4%, and Squarespace at 4.2%.

Tracking the popularity of social media platforms mentioned on .com sites, as seen in Figure 3, reveals that Facebook is still the dominant platform, followed closely by Instagram. X (Twitter), LinkedIn and YouTube come next, while TikTok ranks sixth with only 2.6% of .com websites mentioning the short-form content platform. As TikTok gains more traction as a business and marketing tool, we’re curious to see how these numbers change in the months and years ahead. The rest of the web has a very similar distribution of social media mentions on websites. Our comparative sample indicates that Facebook is also most common on the rest of the web, along with WhatsApp. X (Twitter) is more prevalent on .com websites than on the combination of other TLD websites. Not shown on the graph, but still noteworthy: Telegram made it into the top 10 globally with mentions on 2.2% of all websites, but did not rank in the top 10 for .com.

Average incoming links, pages, and word count

The majority of .com websites have no incoming links. For 82.5% of them, no other websites link to their address—this number aligns with the comparison sample, where 82.1% also show no incoming links. At the other extreme, 16,941 websites (less than 0.1%) have more than 1,000 incoming links, which means that over a thousand other websites link to that one (non-redirecting) website. A .com website has 18.2 pages and an overall word count of 248 words per page, on average, and these numbers include all types of websites, including placeholders. If looking only at .com websites classified as  ‘business,’ the average number of pages increases to 34 and word count to 558. In our global comparison sample, ‘business’ classified websites have 599 words and 36 pages on average, considerably more than on .com sites in general. 

How secure are .com domains: SSL coverage

Lastly, let’s take a peek at website security, specifically SSL coverage. Figure 4 shows that of all .com websites, 68.4% have a valid Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate—in contrast to the 73.6% of websites globally—and the remaining 31.6% have either no or an invalid certificate attached to them. Of this remainder, the majority are Placeholders (64.5%) which means they don’t necessarily have content or visitors to secure. Nevertheless, the other 5.8 million content, business, and e-commerce .com sites are operating under reduced security conditions.

The global scale of .com

Dot-com domains remain a critical part of the global digital landscape and a good indicator of overall web trends. Due to its universal recognition and appeal, .com domains can be found in every country, and it's widespread hosting locations demonstrate its popularity around the world. The majority of hosting is concentrated in the USA, where even though the .us ccTLD exists, .com is the go-to TLD. Despite this global prominence, however, many .com websites remain relatively small in scope and lack significant external engagement. Companies like Amazon and WordPress dominate their field in the .com space, which reflects the state of the broader digital landscape. And, even though many .com domains have adopted SSL security, a considerable number still operate with insufficient protection—indicative of the ongoing struggle to keep the internet secure against malicious actors.

Tracking the .com TLD helps us understand the online world just a little better: it highlights continuing challenges in securing the web, the global use of gTLDs versus ccTLDs, the performance of web tech and tech companies, and the various demands of the online world on our physical one. There is more data out there than could be combed through in a lifetime, but taking .com as a little snapshot of a vast digital picture makes understanding the internet just a little bit easier.