The Great Unbundling

In an earlier analysis, ShareShift showed that less than half of new inventory across Europe is hosting functional websites; the rest is parked, for sale or otherwise undeveloped. The data was already pointing toward a share shift between technologies, rather than an increase in activation and usage.

Data on newer cohorts has come in since then, and our technology has evolved as well. We took a fresh look at the last 6 months' of new domain registrations to get a fresh reading on utilization. Here's what's changed:

• Share of functional sites in Q1'26 is now at 55% vs 42% reported earlier. This is a partly a timing effect, and partly a change in classification.
• July sites are more likely to be developed than February or March: 63% vs 55%. This is counter-intuitive given that newer domains have had the least time to be developed.
• Intake volume is volatile. Normal seasonality curves would show up as lower summer volumes; however, mass ingestion events in our dataset forced us to exclude certain weeks. Jun'26 still shows elevated due to expansion of our .de coverage with many parked & redirected domains, previously untracked.

We will continue monitoring these cohorts, and their churn rates at a 1-year mark, to establish whether higher usage leads to greater retention and higher ARPUs.

Where's the Money? Web Stack Visualized

To understand which vendors are benefitting the most from the current market expansion, and which ones are at risk of share erosion, we need to first map and price the web tech stack. For that, we took a typical European SMB wanting to sell on the web, and mapped their full technology stack across five different vendor routes. Each column represents a choice a business might make today. Each row is a layer of that stack.

Three things stand out:

1. The AI Builder stack is the most expensive at €660–900/yr due to de-bundled infrastructure & tooling costs.
2. Wix and Shopify are the most integrated; as one-stop shops with strong lock-in, they only leave email as a recurring revenue opportunity with whoever holds the domain.
3. Dev Stack bypassing “traditional hosting” can be the most cost-efficient. Running a headless site on Cloudflare infrastructure can be significantly cheaper than other routes. Hosters beware: this is a significant threat to ongoing relationships with tech-savvy customers.

The table above shows the complex tech stack powering an active digital asset, and the potential for (un-)bundling.

What follows is that unbundling and associated revenue leakage ,as well as commercial and volume growth strategies. The key is, all findings are traced through real data: site builders losing to hosters; WordPress CMS losing to AI; e-commerce Shopify pulling compute from traditional hosters, neoclouds bypassing half the stack with the help of Cloudflare, and so on.

Same 56M+ domains. Different ways the "website" customer relationship gets thinner.

The top CMSs in Europe differ widely: from vertically integrated Wix, Squarespace and Wix, to the legacy open-source Joomla and channel-driven Duda AI. And the last twelve months have not treated them the same:

• Squarespace grew its portfolio by +16% YoY*, earning a spot in the Top 20 Fastest Growing Companies in Q2. This site builder is particularly strong in Nordic markets.
• Wix's domain portfolio remained flat which is effectively share erosion given that the overall market has expanded. Its highest share is in the UK, followed by Switzerland, Belgium and Austria.
• Jimdo lost 5% of its domains and considers Germany its stronghold. We'll dive deeper into the drivers behind Jimdo's contraction now.

* Note: While directionally correct, this nameserver-based analysis inflates absolute counts for Squarespace as it includes all former Google domains regardless of their website content.

In the last 6 months, we see wide swings in both intake and outflow across top site builders. Understanding those movements explains why the category overall is enduring a squeeze.

• Intake: These are domains going online with one of the site builders. We see a period-over-period increase of +21% for Squarespace here (i.e. more customers launching in the 1st half of 2026 than in 2nd half of 2025).
• Structural Churn: These are domains going dark from expiry or deletion; churn that is notoriously high to address. All site builders posted an increase in volume here, with Jimdo as worst hit.
• Migratory Churn: Secondary in absolute volume but rising. For Jimdo, every second domain migrates somewhere else. For Squarespace, Q2'26 so a dramatic increase in percentages, but the absolute volume is in the low hundreds, not a game changer.

For the mechanics of migration vs. natural churn behind these numbers, see our churn dissection brief.

Direct Learnings for Hosting Operators

For European registrars holding the domain with a site builder customer, not all is lost. ShareShift has identified two concrete revenue opportunities in this segment, available to any operator willing to look. Paying customers get ready access to domain lists in this segment.

To understand if WordPress' market share decline is likely to accelerate under mounting pressure from AI-powered alternatives, ShareShift has been tracking technologies that new European sites are choosing.

We report on shares per group of similar technologies, per monthly cohort. Because newer domains and sites tend to be less developed than older ones, relative shares are a more objective measure of market share shifts than absolute site counts. Here are the findings:

• WordPress is rapidly losing share. From 39% to 27% in just six months is a huge shift.
• Frameworks gained 500bps going from 8% to 13%. These sites running Next.js or similar are highly likely to be built with AI, but no overt traces are left in the telemetry.
• By July 2026, every second new website is running custom code or other unclassified tech. Again, many of these sites are likely to be AI-generated but not associated with a specific detectable tool.

Platform structure: who owns European e-commerce?

Across 827,000 e-commerce domains fingerprinted by ShareShift, WooCommerce averages 69% share and Shopify averages 18%. The remaining 13% is split between PrestaShop (strong in France, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic), Shopware (almost exclusively DACH), Magento, Ecwid, and BigCommerce each below 4%.

The two-platform concentration means that for large pan-European hosters, the e-commerce question reduces to a single strategic question: how many of your e-commerce customers are on WooCommerce (and therefore still paying for hosting) versus Shopify (and paying you only for the domain)?

However, for regional and local operators, important nuances do exist:

• Shopify is strongest where purchasing power is highest. The five markets where Shopify share exceeds 25% are UK, DK, NO, SE & DE; these are also markets with high average transaction values and overall e-commerce penetration rates. Here merchants are ready to pay for specialized SaaS rather than put a custom web tech stack together from components.
• Central and Eastern European markets are WooCommerce-dominant, with 82–87% share in .hu and .sk. The implication is that hosting revenue from e-commerce customers is significantly more secure in CEE markets than in Western and Nordic ones. But CEE is also where Shopify's growth runway is largest.
• PrestaShop presents a significant hosting-dependent e-commerce population in the markets where it’s strongest. Any hoster with a French, Spanish, Polish, or Czech customer base should be tracking PrestaShop separately.

Hosters’ defence

Hosting-independent platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce) are a direct erosion of revenues, and it’s not symmetrical. Hosters lose the high-frequency, high-margin revenue while retaining the low-frequency, low-margin anchor: the domain renewal.

Strategic implication: two different plays for two different markets. Both readily available within ShareShift’s interface.

• UK, DACH, and Nordics: Leverage platform intelligence to target pay-only sites with no Shopify signals, and build retention flows for those that do.
• CEE and Southern Europe: Compete on managed WordPress and WooCommerce quality, performance and support. Hosting revenue from e-commerce customers here is materially more secure, but Shopify's growth runway in CEE is also largest, making this a defend-now window.

How is Shopify Growing?

Broadly speaking, growth drivers fueling growth are:

1. 62% New Inventory: new domains registered with Shopify in mind from day 1
2. 21% Activations: older domains that eventually gain a functional site
3. 17% Migrations: a domain with a functional site, no errors, switches over

Two-thirds of Shopify's intake is brand-new inventory; hosting operators had no chance here. The rest is equally split between activation of dormant domains, and switchers that abandon their old sites completely.

In other words, nearly 1 in 5 sites outgrows their hoster and switches to Shopify. There is a real opportunity to engage with these actively growing, high-traffic ecommerce sites to offer right-sized services before they cancel everything but the domain renewal fee.

The Next-Gen Web is Here.

To understand the emerging AI-builder trend, ShareShift tracks "next-generation" site deployments across Europe. These are a narrower sub-set of framework-native, custom-code, or AI-built deployments that are self-hosted or running on hyperscaler infrastructure. Only the domain is managed by the registrar layer.

Our current - conservative! - estimate is that 12% of the European web is running outside the traditional hosting universe. And the share of monthly deployments reached 37% of all new sites in July. Interestingly, UK contributes significantly more to that growth compared to Germany, a comparably large European market. Some markets are clearly onboarding into AI faster than others.

In the new tech stack, Cloudflare and AWS took the infrastructure, while the application layer is driven by neoclouds like Vercel, which we analyzed in "State of AI" and, increasingly, by Lovable.

Lovable: Three Perspectives

As the hottest AI-native site generator in town, Lovable's footprint and growth trajectory are a relevant proxy for the overall development of the segment.

Tech stack: 67% on own infrastructure

By default, Lovable operates Cloudflare for SaaS making it hard to pin-point the underlying infrastructure. However, for 2/3 of the web apps analyzed, no other server fingerprints exist. The rest is running on neoclouds like Vercel and Netlify, as well as a long tail of different other server configurations not attributable to a single provider. Overall, the lack of traditional hosting infrastructure in Lovable's footprint is not surprising given the platform defaults it operates with.

Geo footprint: 0.5% of UK vs 10.9% of Sweden?

As for market adoption, absolute volumes and market shares are pointing in opposite directions:

• UK is Lovable's largest regional market by volume, but its share of new sites is record-low at just 0.5%.
• Sweden barely makes it into the Top 5 ranking, but this volume represents 11% of all new sites. Norway and Finland aren't far behind, either.

Our read: The strong Nordic concentration demonstrates that local branding is a real adoption lever for AI builder tools. A European-headquartered AI builder with hosting integration could replicate Lovable's infrastructure capture deliberately, at scale.

These numbers are impressive. Yet ShareShift believes that there's still room for another AI site builder; one that could direct hosting and compute revenues to a European provider instead of Cloudflare. That opportunity currently belongs to whoever moves first.

What the highest-value customers actually look like

The unspoken truth in the hosting industry is, the best customer is a passive one. Like in a commercial gym, operators prefer loyal customers that pay for “all in one” plans without ever using the facilities. Any CRM-based search will identify the highest-LTV customers by their invoice history.

The crucial missing component in such internal reports is a mismatch between the invoice value, and total digital spend. Few hosters know which of their customers are paying for the cheapest “starter” plan while running massive marketing campaigns and making millions from their digital presence. That's the gap ShareShift aims to fill.

ShareShift's commercial tech score is a proprietary assessment of the digital wallet, i.e. the monthly spend of website owners that goes on top of annual renewal and hosting fees. The methodology considers whether a site is transactional, has integrated TrustPilot or Google Reviews, a chatbot for enquiries, etc. The result goes beyond a "propensity to buy" score; ShareShift calculates an actual monthly spend, comparable to current invoices that the registrar and hosting operator collect.

An uncomfortable truth of the European web is, less than half of the registered domains are actively being used to host real websites. These did not pass our "liveness" gate before a commercial tech score could be assigned. Here is how the remaining 22 million domains are distributed:

• 5% Tier 0: live sites with little content, e.g. a placeholder or a login screen
• 40% Tier 1: sites with basic content; spending €1-6/month on website tools
• 39% Tier 2: typically, sites with 2-5 integrations; spending up to €60/month
• 14% Tier 3: advanced sites with a monthly digital spend of €60-250
• 1.3% Tier 4: sophisticated sites scoring high in multiple categories within the composite score and spending above €300/month on average
• 0.2% or c. 36k Tier 5: top-tier sites, often with e-commerce and advanced marketing capabilities, where the average monthly spend exceeds €670!