The unofficial documentation project

SideDoorSites documents the website builders that ship as side products of technology giants: Google Sites, Square Online, Canva Websites, Adobe Express, and Microsoft Power Pages. Combined market value of the parent companies: measured in trillions. Combined marketing effort for these five products: difficult to distinguish from zero. We write the register, dossiers and change history these products would have if anyone inside the buildings were assigned to produce them.

Why side products

Because people use them anyway. A club puts its schedule on Google Sites; a food truck runs its whole operation through a free Square store; a freelancer's portfolio is a Canva link. These users deserve the same quality of information as someone comparing mainstream builders, and they get dramatically less of it — the vendors under-document, and reviewers with commission dashboards look elsewhere. We cover the gap.

There is also the platform-risk angle. Products that make no money for their parent survive on institutional goodwill, and goodwill has a documented failure mode — see the business.site shutdown, in which Google deleted millions of small-business sites on roughly fourteen months' notice. Somebody should be keeping notes on these products. It turned out to be us.

Method

Every dossier is built from primary sources: official documentation, pricing pages, help centers, release-note feeds, and — where the vendors go quiet — their own community forums, where staff answers sometimes say what marketing pages will not. We read these the way you read a contract: the operative clauses are usually the ones about what is excluded. Direct quotations appear as exhibits, verbatim. Facts carry their checking date, and the fact base gets re-checked whenever a vendor page moves, which is generally how we learn it moved.

What we do not do: hands-on benchmark numbers we cannot reproduce, invented user testimonials, or hedged both-sides verdicts. Where a figure could not be verified against a live authoritative page, the copy says so — "around", "at the time of checking" — rather than asserting it. Scores follow a fixed ladder explained on the comparison page.

Affiliation: none

SideDoorSites is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Google, Block (Square), Canva, Adobe, or Microsoft. Product names and trademarks appear solely to identify the products under review — nominative use, the thing names are for. If any of those companies would like to dispute a fact in a dossier, the fastest route is documentation: send the URL.

Money

Some outbound links earn commissions — mostly for the products we recommend graduating to, not for the builders themselves, an inversion covered honestly in the affiliate disclosure. Corrections and undocumented limits go to the contact page; the inbox is read by the people who write the dossiers, because there is nobody else here.