Google Sites Review: Google's Website Builder, Documented

There is no product called the Google website builder — that is the first thing worth documenting. What Google actually ships is Google Sites: a section-based page editor bundled free with every Google account and every Workspace subscription, rebuilt in 2016 and left standing after its classic predecessor was decommissioned in January 2023. This Google Sites review treats the product the way its own vendor does not: as a website builder to be evaluated on its merits, rather than a checkbox near the bottom of the Workspace feature grid.

The summary up front: this is the most genuinely free product on our register, and one of the most firmly capped. Both halves deserve documentation, and Google's own pages serve as the exhibits throughout.

What Google Sites is in 2026

Google Sites ships with every consumer Google account and every Google Workspace plan, and there is no paid tier of the product itself — a pricing model that tells you a great deal about how Google regards it. Nobody at Google is paid to upsell you a better Sites, because a better Sites is not for sale. The current product is the so-called new Sites; classic Sites was switched off in January 2023 after a multi-year migration, and what remains is a clean drag-and-drop editor built around stacked sections, whose output looks consistently tidy and whose options end early.

Against the mainstream builders it occupies a strange position on the market map: more restricted than any of them, cheaper than all of them, and better integrated with Google's office suite than anything else on the internet. We keep a running head-to-head in our Google Sites vs Wix comparison for readers weighing the free ceiling against a paid floor.

The price is $0 — the cost is your Drive quota

Google Sites has no bill, but it does have a meter, and the meter is documented in the Workspace admin requirements:

“Sites and the content you embed in sites count toward your Drive storage quota.” — Google Workspace admin documentation, retrieved August 2026

The mechanics are stranger than that sentence suggests. Images and files added to a site are stored inside the site file itself, not as separate Drive items — which means deleting the Sites file deletes the embedded content along with it, and there is no per-site storage line anywhere to audit. Your website, your inbox and your photo library all drink from the same quota. For a small site this is a rounding error. It is still worth knowing the meter exists, because Google does not surface it anywhere near the editor.

Custom domains: genuinely free, with documented caps

Here is the headline feature most reviews miss: connecting a custom domain to a published Google Site costs nothing from Google. You pay your registrar for the domain; Google maps it without charging you. That is rarer than it should be in this category — several paid builders still treat domain connection as a premium unlock — and it is the single strongest argument for taking Sites seriously as a public-facing option.

The caps, per the official domain-mapping documentation: up to 5 custom domains per site, a hard limit of 20 domain mappings per week, CNAME-based setup, and 24 to 48 hours of propagation. One operational footnote deserves respect: the site must be published to the world, because a domain mapped to a restricted site simply redirects visitors back to the sites.google.com address, which is not the impression a custom domain is meant to make. The weekly mapping limit is the kind of cap you only hit on purpose — but it is documented, so we document it.

The capacity numbers Google stopped publishing

Community answers and third-party help sites still circulate hard limits for Sites — figures on the order of 10,000 pages per site, roughly 15,000 images, and somewhere around 40 million characters. We flag these as folklore with decent provenance: Google's current requirements page no longer publishes any of them, so treat the numbers as best estimates observed at the time of checking rather than terms of service. In practice, the caps a normal site will actually collide with are softer ones — the editor's patience with very large sites, and yours. We keep the fuller inventory of quiet ceilings like these, across all five products we cover, in the hidden limits of free big-tech builders.

The design ceiling

The editor is section-based: you stack rows, fill them with text, images and embeds, and choose from a small set of themes. Custom themes — your fonts, colors and logo — arrived in September 2023 and remain the newest substantive design feature the product has received. There is no CSS access, no HTML access to the page itself, and no theme marketplace. Custom code exists only inside sandboxed Embed iframes, which is to say: you may decorate the cell, but you may not renovate the building.

Commerce, meanwhile, is not limited; it is absent. No cart, no checkout, no payments and no product catalog appear anywhere in the product or its documentation. The only documented route to selling anything is embedding a third-party widget — a PayPal button inside an iframe — which is a workaround wearing a feature's name tag. If a store is the point, Sites is the wrong register entry entirely; our Square Online review covers the one big-tech side product that ships a real checkout.

Workspace integration is the actual product

Judged as a Workspace surface rather than a website builder, Sites earns its keep. It embeds Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Calendar, Maps and whole Drive folders natively; it gained authenticated AppSheet app embeds in March 2025; and it lets multiple editors work simultaneously with visible cursors, exactly like a shared Doc. For an intranet, a team handbook, a classroom hub or a project site, that combination is quietly excellent — a live spreadsheet on a page the whole team can edit is still something mainstream builders make you work for. It is also the ceiling. Everything Sites does well is a re-presentation of some other Google product, and the moment your requirements leave the Google estate, so does the value.

Maintenance mode, per the changelog

The Google Workspace Updates blog keeps a label for Google Sites, and the label reads like a well-tended graveyard. Two announcements in all of 2025 — authenticated AppSheet embeds on March 12, and search within embedded content on July 8 — and nothing tagged for 2026 as of August. The last substantive feature work before that pair was the September 2023 branding themes. For comparison, over the same stretch the mainstream builders shipped AI site generation, checkout upgrades and template marketplaces; Sites shipped a search box for embedded content. The product is hosted, patched and presumably monitored, by a team of indeterminate size. Maintained is the honest word for this. Developed would be marketing.

The exit that does not exist

There is no export. Not a bad export, not a partial export — none. No HTML download, no migration tool, no supported path that moves a Google Site anywhere that is not Google Sites. If the product were ever retired, you would rebuild from scratch, and Google has documented precedent in this genre: business.site pages were switched off in March 2024 and their redirects went dark that June, converting millions of small-business URLs into dead links. We wrote up the entire affair in what happened to business.site. The rational read is not that Sites is doomed — it is too load-bearing inside Workspace for that — but your only insurance policy here is content you are prepared to retype.

Who should actually use Google Sites

Use it if your site is informational, your organization already lives in Google, and your design ambitions end at tidy: team sites, documentation hubs, clubs, classrooms, a modest public page for a community group. The free custom domain makes it a perfectly defensible public face for any operation whose website is a noticeboard rather than a storefront — and at $0 forever, the total cost of being wrong is your time.

Skip it if you need commerce, design control, or the ability to leave. For the full field ranked side by side, consult our big-tech website builders register; if the ceiling described above is the specific problem, a mainstream builder like Wix removes it for a monthly fee, and when you've outgrown them maps the graduation paths in detail. Google Sites closes at 7.8 on an unusual virtue: it does everything it documents. It simply documents very little.