The pandemic is still shaping Canadian businesses’ and creators’ digital migration as the number of .CA domains registered still exceeds pre-pandemic levels. CIRA has looked into the trends that have popped up from April to September 2021 to understand the evolving dynamic of Canadians’ online behaviour.
Leveraging registry and provincial data, third-party vendors, and publicly available information, CIRA’s new .CA Insights Report shows that the demand for creating a Canadian website still remains strong. Consumers’ online shopping habits are still going strong as four out of the top 10 visited .CA sites in Canada are related to e-commerce.
The findings from the new Q3 report have confirmed most of the trends seen in the first quarter, with a few exceptions.
Key Findings
- The full findings can be found in the Q3 2021 .CA Insights Report.
- A 2020 survey commissioned by CIRA found that, even with the explosive growth of e-commerce, half of Canadian small businesses still don’t have a website.
- While growth for .CA domains registration has decelerated slightly from its high in 2020-21, it is still well above its 2019 low as small businesses continue to pivot online in response to the pandemic.
- Although Ontario continues to hold the title of the province with the most .CAs registered, British Columbia and Alberta have been some of the fastest movers since Q1, adding 14k and 8k new domains, respectively.
- .CA domains are safe, secure and reliable – over 66% of .CAs have an SSL certificate (+11% from Q1) and only 0.3% of all .CA domains are used maliciously, one of the lowest abuse rates among global top-level domains.
About CIRA
CIRA (The Canadian Internet Registration Authority) manages the .CA top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians. CIRA also develops technologies and services—such as CIRA DNS Firewall and CIRA Canadian Shield—that help support its goal of building a trusted internet for Canadians. CIRA team operates one of the fastest-growing country code top-level domains (ccTLD), a high-performance global DNS network, and one of the world’s most advanced back-end registry solutions.