Google Sites for Business: Free, But Good Enough?

Name: Web60
Address: Block B, Maynooth Business Campus, Straffan Rd, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, W23 W5X7, IE
Price range: €60/year

In March 2024, Google switched off every website that small businesses had built through their Google Business Profiles. Visitors to those business.site addresses were redirected to the owner's Business Profile until 10 June 2024, and after that they got a "page not found". Search Engine Journal reported the shutdown at the time, along with the list of replacement builders Google suggested. One of the names on that list was Google's own: Google Sites.

That suggestion is why I get asked about Google Sites more than you might expect. It is free. It sits inside the Google account most owner-operators already use for Gmail and Calendar. It looks clean. And for a certain kind of page, it is perfectly good.

But it was built for school projects, internal team pages and club noticeboards. It was not built to win customers from Google search, take bookings or sell anything. This article is the reference I wish I could hand people when they ask whether Google Sites is "good enough" for a business. It covers what the tool actually does, where it runs out of road, and what the alternative costs.

What Google Sites actually is

Google Sites is a drag-and-drop page builder that comes free with any Google account. You pick a theme, drop in text boxes, images, buttons and embedded Google Docs, Sheets, Forms or YouTube videos, then press publish. The site lives at a sites.google.com address unless you connect your own domain.

There is no hosting to buy, no software to update and nothing to install. Google runs the servers and Google decides what the builder can do.

That last point matters more than any feature. With Google Sites you are not running a website platform. You are using one product among hundreds that Google maintains, and you get the features Google chooses to ship, on the timeline Google chooses.

Google Sites vs a WordPress site at a glance

Question	Google Sites	WordPress on Web60
What does it cost?	Free with a Google account	€60/year, everything included
Can you control how pages appear in Google results?	Page titles only, no meta descriptions or structured data	Full control of titles, descriptions and structured data
Can you use your own domain?	Yes, built around a www address	Yes, or a free smartsitebuilder.ie subdomain
Can you sell, take bookings or add features?	No shop or booking system, embeds only	Full plugin ecosystem, including shops and booking tools
Who decides the product's future?	Google	You own the site and its content

Each row deserves a closer look, because the short answers hide the parts that actually cost businesses customers.

Cost: free really is free

Credit where it is due. Google Sites costs nothing. No trial that expires, no "starter plan" that triples on renewal, no surprise invoice for SSL. Google serves the site over HTTPS without you lifting a finger.

For a business with zero budget and a one-page need, that is a genuine advantage, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The cost shows up somewhere else. It shows up in the customers who never find the page, the enquiries that cannot be captured properly and the rebuild you do when the business outgrows the tool. Those costs do not appear on an invoice, which is exactly why they get ignored. We have worked through the real cost of free website builders over three years elsewhere, and the pattern holds here.

How your pages appear in Google search

This is where Google Sites hurts a business most, and it is the part nobody mentions on the sign-up screen.

When I pulled the source code of a published Google Sites page this week, the head of the page contained a title, a handful of Open Graph tags for social sharing, and nothing else that search engines use to understand a business. No meta description. No structured data. Several independent Google Sites guides say the same: the current version of Sites gives you no box to write a meta description, and no way to add the code that describes a local business to Google.

Why should a café owner care about two bits of invisible code?

The meta description is your shop window

The meta description is the short paragraph you write to sit under your link in search results. Google's own Search Central documentation says it will sometimes use that description if it gives users a more accurate summary than text pulled from the page itself. Without one, Google picks a fragment of your page on its own. Sometimes that works. Sometimes the snippet under your business name is a stray line of navigation or half a sentence about parking.

Think about what that looks like from the searcher's side. Three results for "mobile mechanic near me". Two say clearly what the business does, where it works and how to book. The third shows a fragment of a footer. The searcher does not know or care which website builder caused it. They just tap one of the other two.

Structured data tells Google the facts

Structured data is a small block of code describing your business in a format machines read directly. Google's LocalBusiness documentation says it lets you tell Google about business hours, departments and more. It is one of the clearest signals you can send about what you are, where you are and when you are open.

On Google Sites, you cannot add it to the page. On WordPress, a free SEO plugin generates it from a form you fill in once.

Neither of these is a ranking guarantee. Good content and a strong Google Business Profile still do most of the work. But when two similar local businesses compete for the same search, the one that controls its own search appearance starts with an edge, and Google Sites takes that control away from you.

Connecting your own domain

You can use your own domain with Google Sites. Google's Sites Help explains the process: you enter the domain in the site settings, follow your registrar's instructions, and verify ownership through Google Search Console if prompted. Google's instructions are built around a www address, and changes can take up to 48 hours to appear.

It works. It is also the step where most non-technical owners get stuck, because it means adding records at the company you bought the domain from, and the screens there look nothing like Google's screenshots. The bare version of your domain (without the www) usually needs a separate forwarding rule at the registrar, which is easy to miss.

Get this wrong and the address printed on your van and business cards leads nowhere useful. The site exists. The domain exists. They just are not talking to each other, and you only find out when a customer mentions it.

With Web60, you connect your own domain from the dashboard, or start on a free smartsitebuilder.ie subdomain while you sort the domain out, and the SSL certificate is provisioned and renewed automatically through Let's Encrypt.

A free page builder gives you a plot. A full website platform gives you room to grow.

Selling, taking bookings and capturing enquiries

Google Sites has no shop. No checkout, no product pages with stock levels, no booking calendar, no proper contact form of its own. The standard workaround is to embed things: a Google Form for enquiries, a Calendar for availability, a link out to a third-party payment page.

Google's Sites Help confirms you can embed HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as long as scripts sit inside script tags. In practice, embedded code runs inside its own contained frame on the page rather than across the whole site, so anything that needs to behave like part of the website (a booking widget that resizes, a chat button that follows the visitor, a cookie notice) tends to look bolted on or not work at all.

Here is the failure that matters. A customer wants to book for Saturday. They land on your page, find a Google Form asking for their name and preferred day, fill it in, and get no confirmation that a slot is actually theirs. Saturday morning arrives and two people turn up for the same hour, or nobody does because they gave up and booked a competitor with a proper calendar.

WordPress powers roughly two in five of all websites, according to W3Techs, and close to six in ten of the sites whose content management system can be identified. That scale is why its plugin library covers almost everything a small business might need: booking systems, WooCommerce for shops, gift vouchers, quote forms, membership areas. You add the feature when you need it, and it becomes part of the site, not a frame stuck on top of it. The same gap shows up with other design-first tools, as our comparison of Canva websites against WordPress found.

Analytics and privacy

Google Sites lets you paste in a Google Analytics measurement ID, and visitor data starts flowing within a day or so. That part is easy.

The catch is that Google Analytics uses cookies, and under Irish and EU rules that generally means getting visitors' consent before tracking them. On Google Sites you cannot install a consent management tool of your choosing, so you rely on whatever Google provides and have little say in how consent is asked for or recorded. Many owners end up either running analytics without being sure their consent set-up holds up, or switching it off and flying blind.

Web60 includes privacy-first analytics that do not need cookie consent for analytics tracking. You still mention your analytics in your privacy policy, and your solicitor is the right person for any remaining disclosure questions, but the consent-banner problem largely goes away.

Who decides whether your site keeps existing

I have run hosting infrastructure for over twenty years, and the question I always ask about any platform is simple: who can switch it off?

With Google Sites, the answer is Google, and Google has form here. The original version of Google Sites, now called classic Sites, was retired between late 2021 and mid-2022. Google's Workspace Updates blog announced that unconverted classic sites would be archived to the owner's Drive and replaced with a draft in the new Sites for the owner to review and publish. Then, two years later, business.site websites were switched off entirely, with a few months' notice.

Neither of those was malicious. Google rationalises products constantly. But if your business website is one of those products, every rationalisation is your problem. The redirect from business.site to the Business Profile ended on 10 June 2024. Every flyer, van livery and email signature carrying that old address has pointed at an error page since.

A WordPress site is different in kind. WordPress is open-source software. Your content sits in a standard database you can export, back up and move to any host that runs WordPress. If you ever decide to leave a host, Web60 included, the site goes with you.

Owning your website means holding the key, not borrowing a room.

Where Google Sites is genuinely the right call

I would not tell everyone to avoid Google Sites. For some jobs it is the sensible choice, and paying for anything else would be a waste.

Internal pages. A staff handbook, a rota page or a training hub for a team that already lives in Google Workspace. Access controls through Google accounts are a real strength here.
Clubs and community groups. A GAA club fixtures page or a residents' association noticeboard, run by volunteers who change every year and need something anyone can edit.
A short-lived project page. An event that happens once, a fundraiser, a placeholder while you decide what the business is going to be.

If your page does not need to be found by strangers on Google, take money or capture leads, Google Sites does the job for nothing. That is an honest recommendation.

The line gets crossed when the page becomes the place customers decide whether to hire you. At that point you need something built for winning customers, and Google Sites was never designed for that.

What moving to a proper website involves

There is no direct export from Google Sites into WordPress. In practice, you rebuild. That sounds worse than it is.

Consider a typical case: a Longford mobile dog groomer who threw together a Google Sites page during a quiet spell. Five sections, a few photos, a phone number. It did its job while the diary filled by word of mouth. Then the groomer wants online booking, a price list that shows properly in Google, and a way to stop answering the same five questions by text every evening. None of that is possible on Sites without a pile of embeds.

The rebuild looks like this:

Gather your content. Copy your text, download your photos and note every page you have. This is the slow part, and it is still under an hour for most small sites.
Generate the new site. Describe the business to an AI website builder and get a designed WordPress site to work from. On Web60, that takes under a minute.
Replace the embeds with real features. Swap the Google Form for a proper contact form and add a booking plugin, so enquiries and appointments land somewhere you can manage them.
Set your search appearance. Write a meta description for each key page and fill in your business details so structured data is generated.
Deploy and redirect. Point your domain at the new site, then update the website link on your Google Business Profile, social pages and email signature.

One honest limitation. AI gets you a professional starting point in seconds, but it cannot know your prices, your service area or what makes you different. The first draft is a scaffold. The site gets good when you spend an evening putting your own words and your own photos into it, and nobody, agency or AI, can do that part better than you.

That is also the whole argument for building it yourself. An agency would charge thousands for a site like this and then bill you by the hour every time the price list changes. With Web60's €60/year all-inclusive WordPress hosting, you get the design, hosting, SSL, nightly backups, security and analytics in one price, and you can edit anything yourself from day one.

Conclusion

Google Sites is a good free tool doing a job it was designed for. Internal pages, club noticeboards and temporary project pages are its natural home, and for those it is hard to beat.

A business website has a different job. It has to be found by strangers, describe itself properly in search results, capture enquiries and bookings, and keep existing whatever a large company decides about its product line. Those requirements point to a platform you own, with full control over how your business appears in Google.

If your current page is on Google Sites and doing nothing more than holding your phone number, it is fine for now. When you want it to start bringing in customers, you know what to look for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Google Sites good enough for a small business website?

For an internal page, a club or a temporary placeholder, yes. For a website that needs to be found on Google, take bookings or sell products, it falls short, because you cannot write meta descriptions, add structured data or install a shop or booking system.

Is Google Sites really free?

Yes. Google Sites is free with any Google account and includes HTTPS. You only pay if you want to buy a custom domain, which you can register anywhere and connect to the site.

Can I use my own domain name with Google Sites?

Yes. Google's Sites Help explains how to connect a custom domain through the site settings, with verification through Google Search Console if prompted. Google's instructions are built around a www address, so the bare domain usually needs a forwarding rule at your registrar, and changes can take up to 48 hours.

Does Google rank Google Sites pages higher because Google owns them?

There is no evidence of that. Google Sites pages are ranked like any other page. They are often at a disadvantage because you cannot set a meta description or add structured data, which a WordPress site lets you control.

Can I move my Google Sites website to WordPress?

There is no direct export from Google Sites into WordPress, so in practice you rebuild. Copy your text and photos, generate a new WordPress site with an AI builder, add your content, then point your domain at the new site and update links on your Google Business Profile.

What happened to websites made with Google Business Profile?

Google turned them off in March 2024. Visitors to business.site addresses were redirected to the Business Profile until 10 June 2024, and after that the addresses stopped working. Owners had to move to a different website builder.

Google Sites for Business: What the Free Builder Can and Cannot Do