Google Sites vs a real business website

Google Sites is free, quick and perfectly good for a simple information page, and it gives you no ranking advantage whatsoever for being a Google product. It runs out when you need design control, real page structure, or anything commercial. Knowing which of those two situations you are in is the whole decision.

A village hall committee asked me last year whether they should pay for a website. They wanted opening times, a booking enquiry form, and a map. I told them not to spend a penny. Google Sites did the job in an afternoon and it is still doing it.

That advice would have been wrong for almost any business trying to win customers from search.

What it does well

Free is a real advantage, not a consolation prize. So is speed of setup. You can have something live before lunch without touching a template gallery for three weekends.

It plugs into the rest of the Google tools naturally, so embedding a form, a calendar or a map takes seconds. The pages load quickly because they are simple. On a phone they behave. Nothing breaks.

For a community group, an internal noticeboard, a one-person side project, or a business that just needs somewhere to point people who already know the name, that is genuinely enough. Anyone telling such a person to spend two thousand pounds is selling, not advising.

Where it runs out

Design. Your site will look like a Google Site. The layout options are deliberately narrow, which is what makes it easy, and it means you cannot build something that looks distinctly like your business. For a hall booking page that does not matter. For a business competing on trust, it slightly does.

Search structure. This is the bigger one. Competing for “roofer in Wakefield” needs a page written to answer that exact question, headings in a sensible order, internal links to related pages, structured data telling search engines what your business is. A simple builder gives you very little control over any of that.

Anything commercial. Bookings, payments, a shop, a proper enquiry flow with automated follow-up. You end up embedding third party tools and living with the joins.

Content at scale. A blog, location pages, service pages that multiply as the business grows. Possible in theory, tedious in practice, and the site gets messy fast.

The test that settles it

Where do you want your next customers to come from?

If the answer is people who already know your name and just need details, a free page is correct and you should stop reading. Connect a domain you own, put your phone number at the top, and go and do something more useful with the money.

If the answer is strangers searching for what you sell, you need a site built to be found. That means multiple pages, a Google Business Profile that points at them, reviews, and someone adding to it over time. No free builder gets you there, and no paid one does either without the work behind it.

Most businesses sit somewhere between the two and drift towards the second as they grow. The signal that you have crossed over is usually irritation: you want to add a page and cannot lay it out how you want, or you realise you have no idea whether anyone finds you.

Moving on without losing anything

Treat the move as a rebuild, because that is what it is. Text and images come across by hand. Layout does not.

Three things make it painless. Keep your written copy in a document outside the platform. Keep the full size original photos. Keep the domain in your name. Do those and the switch is a week of someone’s work rather than starting from zero.

The parallel comparison for the other common free tool is in Canva websites vs a real website, and if you want to know what a proper build actually costs, small business website cost has the honest ranges.

What we would say if you asked us

If a free page fits what you are doing, we would tell you to keep it. That is not false modesty, it is that we would rather not take money for something a free tool does adequately.

If you have outgrown it, our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, covering the site, hosting, updates and the work of being found. Nobody can promise you rankings or a number of enquiries, and treat anyone who does with suspicion.

Send us the link to your current page and we will tell you plainly whether it is holding you back or doing exactly what you need. Both answers happen roughly as often as each other.