Domain Transfer Help

  • Unknown's avatar
    vcarbol · Member ·

    Hi squad, I deleted my wordpress domain and site so I could move to squarespace (I was a fool who did not know I could select “transfer domain” until it was too late) and now squarespace says it’s still held by wordpress. WordPress’s truly wonderful AI is repeating that info, but it can’t tell me where it’s connected and there is no option for me to recover it. Has anyone else run into this? How do you get WordPress to properly release the domain even after deleting it?

  • Unknown's avatar
    hellocom8123094098 · Member ·

    Hi!

    According to the documentation, if you delete a domain you forfeit any remaining time until its expiry date. I have never personally seen this issue before but you can contact WordPress support about this specific issue and ask them to help your restore the deleted domain here: https://wordpress.com/support/contact/

    The documentation on this issue is here: https://wordpress.com/support/domains/cancel-refund-a-domain/

    Some overall thoughts on strategy given how important domains are:

    1) With domains everything is time sensitive. I would recommend that you read that document page right away and contact WordPress support as quickly as possible to expedite any options support has for restoring domains.

    2) As you progress through the process, keep an eye out on your domain registration. Do a WHOIS on your domain to see if it has been re-registered. Expired domains will typically have 30 to 60 days grace periods if you forget to re-register. I suspect it is the same for deleted domains with WordPress.com but it is good to be on top of this. You can try https://lookup.icann.org for whois info or another reputable online service. You are looking for registration dates and domain ownership if it is publicly visible. That will give you clues if someone has taken the domain or not.

    3) The other thing I would do is think about using a third party registrar and try to re-register the domain from there. Again, because it will be under a grace period you most likely won’t be able to, but that is a good thing. It will give WordPress support time to look into the issue for you.

    Let me know if you found that helpful.

  • staff-imahappyengineer · Staff ·

    @vcarbol I’ve sent you an email with details about restoring your domain name so you can transfer it to Squarespace. We can continue through email.

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