No. Copyright may be claimed in website content, but not in a website. A website is a location on the Internet represented by a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that includes a domain name. Copyrights cannot be claimed in domain names and URLs. Moreover, the Copyright Act does not recognize a website as a type of copyrightable subject matter. It may be possible to register the contents of a website as a compilation, though.
You may register website content as a compilation if there is a sufficient amount of creative expression in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the content appearing on the web pages or the website as a whole. If you register a website as a compilation, it may cover both the website as a whole (the selection and arrangement of website elements) and individual works appearing on it, but only if you own the copyrights in both the compilation and the individual works appearing on the website.
A claim in a compilation applies only to the elements that are provided in the deposit copy. It does not cover previous or future iterations of the website. Nor does it cover the general layout or “look and feel” of a web page. For this reason, claims consisting solely of style sheet languages, such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), generally cannot be registered.
The U.S. Copyright Office now offers additional options for registering groups of updates to a news website (GRNW ) and groups of short online literary works (GRTX ). These may be useful for registering website content in some cases.
