What Is Google Sites? The Free Builder Inside Your Google Account
Google Sites is a free, section-based website builder that ships with every Google account and every Google Workspace plan. There is no paid tier, no cart, and no export. Google rebuilt the product in 2016 and switched off its classic predecessor in January 2023, leaving a drag-and-drop editor that stacks rows of text, images and embedded Google files. This entry documents what the product is, what it is genuinely used for, and the point at which its documented limits stop being tolerable. Every figure below is drawn from Google's own pages as recorded on this site.
What Google Sites is, in plain terms
Google ships no product called the Google website builder. What it ships is Sites: a page editor bundled with a consumer Google account and with every Workspace subscription, at no cost, with no upgrade path — because there is no paid version to upgrade to. That pricing model explains most of the product's behavior. Nobody inside Google is compensated for selling you a better Sites.
The editor works in stacked sections. You add a row, drop in text, an image or an embedded Google file, and the grid settles the alignment for you. Themes are few. Custom themes — your own fonts, colors and logo — arrived in September 2023 and remain the most recent substantial design feature the product has received. There is no CSS access and no HTML access to the page itself; custom code runs only inside sandboxed embed frames. Several people can edit one site simultaneously with visible cursors, exactly as in a shared Doc. Our full Google Sites review takes the product apart piece by piece.
The release cadence belongs in the record too. The Workspace updates feed tagged two Sites announcements in all of 2025 — authenticated AppSheet embeds in March, search inside embedded content in July — and nothing in 2026 as of August. Maintained is the accurate word for this product. Developed would be marketing.
The price is zero. The meter is your Drive quota.
There is no bill, but there is a meter, and Google documents it in the Workspace admin requirements: sites and the content you embed in them count toward your Drive storage quota, per documentation retrieved August 2026. Your website, your inbox and your photo library draw on one allowance, and no per-site storage line appears anywhere near the editor.
The mechanics are stranger than that sentence suggests. Images and files added to a site are stored inside the site file itself rather than as separate Drive items, so deleting the Sites file deletes the embedded content with it. Against that sits the most valuable free thing on offer here: connecting a custom domain costs nothing from Google. You pay a registrar for the name, Google maps it without charging, and the caps are modest enough that most owners never meet them — up to 5 custom domains per site, no more than 20 domain mappings a week, CNAME setup, 24 to 48 hours of propagation. Our catalogue of hidden limits collects the same species of clause across all five products in this register.
One caution about capacity. Google no longer publishes page or image limits for Sites, so the numbers still circulating in community answers are folklore with decent provenance rather than terms of service.
| Item | What the documentation says |
|---|---|
| Price | $0 with any Google account or Workspace plan; no paid tier of the product exists |
| Storage | Sites and embedded content count toward your Drive storage quota |
| Custom domain | Free from Google; up to 5 per site, 20 mappings per week, CNAME, 24–48h propagation |
| Publishing catch | A mapped domain redirects back to sites.google.com unless the site is published to the world |
| Commerce | None — no cart, checkout, payments or product catalog |
| Code access | Sandboxed embed frames only; no CSS or HTML on the page itself |
| Export | None |
| Page and image capacity | No longer published by Google — see vendor |
What Google Sites is actually good for
The short answer to what Google Sites is used for is informational and internal publishing inside an organization that already lives in Google's tools. In that habitat it is not a compromise; it is the correct instrument, and it is free, which removes the last argument against trying it first. Four shapes account for nearly every well-built Google Site we have documented.
- A team intranet or staff handbook, with a live Sheet and a shared Calendar embedded on the page
- A classroom or course hub, where the Docs, Slides and Forms are the teaching material anyway
- A club, committee or community noticeboard that needs an address more than it needs a design
- A project or documentation site several people edit at once, like a Doc that grew navigation
Sites embeds Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Calendar, Maps and whole Drive folders natively, and it added authenticated AppSheet app embeds in March 2025. A live spreadsheet on a page the whole team can edit is still something mainstream builders make you assemble out of parts.
The answer stops working the moment the audience is a customer rather than a colleague. Sites hands you a page title and a publish switch: no redirect manager, no structured-data interface, no meaningful per-page metadata. If the site has to compete in search results, take a payment, or capture a lead through a form that is not a Google Form, the documented route is a mainstream builder — and moving to a Wix paid plan removes each of those ceilings for a monthly fee. The full side-by-side is in our Google Sites versus Wix comparison, and the graduation paths for everything in this register are mapped on when you have outgrown them.
Where the ceiling sits
Commerce is absent, not limited
No cart, no checkout, no payments, no product catalog — not in the product, not in its documentation. The only recorded way to take money is embedding a third-party widget inside an iframe, which is a workaround wearing a feature's badge. If a storefront is the actual point, the side-door product that ships a real checkout is Square: starting on Square Online's free plan puts unlimited items and genuine ordering behind a per-sale rate instead of a monthly fee. The arithmetic is in our Square Online review.
Design control ends at the theme
Fonts, colors, a logo and a small set of themes: that is the whole surface area. The rigidity has a genuine upside, in that it is difficult to publish an ugly Google Site. It is equally difficult to publish a distinctive one, which is why design-led work usually ends up on a subscription platform like Squarespace, where the layout is yours to get wrong.
There is no export, and there is precedent
No HTML download, no migration tool, no supported path out. If the product were retired you would rebuild from scratch, and Google has form: business.site pages were switched off in March 2024 and the redirects went dark on June 10 that year, converting millions of small-business URLs into dead links. Our incident report keeps that timeline. The rational read is not that Sites is doomed — it is load-bearing inside Workspace — but the only insurance is a domain you own and content you are prepared to retype.
Google Sites: documented questions
Q.01What is Google Sites used for?
Mostly internal and informational publishing: team intranets, staff handbooks, classroom and course hubs, club noticeboards and project documentation. It suits organizations already working in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Calendar, because those files embed natively and stay live on the page. Public marketing sites are possible but constrained, since search and design controls are thin.
Q.02Is Google Sites completely free?
Yes, in the sense that no plan exists to buy. It comes with any consumer Google account and every Workspace subscription, and there is no paid tier of the product itself. The one non-obvious cost is storage: Google documents that sites and the content embedded in them count toward your Drive quota, which your mail and photos also draw on.
Q.03Can you use a custom domain with Google Sites?
Yes, and Google charges nothing to map it — you pay only your registrar for the name. The documented caps are up to 5 custom domains per site and no more than 20 domain mappings per week, using CNAME records, with 24 to 48 hours of propagation. The site must be published to the world, or the domain quietly redirects back to the sites.google.com address.
Q.04Can you sell products on Google Sites?
No. There is no cart, no checkout, no payment handling and no product catalog anywhere in the product or the documentation. The only route recorded is embedding a third-party payment widget inside an iframe, which handles a single button rather than a store. If selling is the purpose of the site, a builder with a real checkout is the correct starting point.
Q.05Can you export a Google Site?
No. There is no HTML download, no migration tool and no supported path that moves a Google Site anywhere other than Google Sites. Moving means rebuilding the pages on the destination platform and copying content across by hand. Owning your domain and keeping source copies of text and images elsewhere is the only practical insurance.
Position in the field: the big-tech website builders register. Outgrowing these products entirely is covered in when you’ve outgrown them.