- Hey guys, my name is Christian Taylor.
Welcome back to Craylor Made
where I like to talk all things,
branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
Today, I'm taking a look at Google Sites,
a website builder from Google for your business or brand.
Unlike some freemium site builders,
Google Sites is 100% free.
There's no paid plans.
So you can access every feature at no charge.
Google Sites offers basic drag and drop functionality,
but there aren't many layouts,
templates or elements available.
It's definitely a scaled back simple site builder.
So here are five things you need to know
before using Google Sites.
Number one, Google Sites does not offer blog,
e-commerce or other dynamic features.
Google Sites is a multi page site builder.
So you can have a homepage, about page,
contact page, et cetera.
However, Google Sites has no blog feature.
This seems like a major oversight
out of a free website builder,
especially when Google still supports blogger.
Combining these two products into one website builder
would be neat.
I'd love to see Google do this in the future.
There's no surprise that e-commerce functionality
isn't included in a free website builder.
But I'm shocked that there's no contact form
or email list opt-in form of any kind.
You'll need to find your own third-party solutions
and embed forms with HTML for this purpose.
You can embed Google Forms directly on the page,
so you could create a contact form that way,
but we'll talk more about this later.
The second thing you need to know before using Google Sites
is the fact that custom domain names
can be connected for free.
Yup, that's right.
No dealing with the sites.google.com URL,
unless you prefer it.
You can connect your own domain name from any registrar,
or you can conveniently purchase the domain
from Google Domains and have it automatically connected
to your website.
Furthermore, Google doesn't display any ads
or any made with Google Sites disclosure on the footer,
which is pretty surprising considering Google Sites
is absolutely free.
Unfortunately, the connection process for your domains
is not held at Google Domains is far from easy.
Google doesn't offer any name servers.
So you'll need to manually set up the DNS records
at your domain registrar
or using a DNS solution like CloudFlare.
You'll also need to verify third-party domains
by adding a TXT record to your DNS
before you're allowed to continue
with connecting it to your Google site.
If you're able to get past this hurdle,
well, there's still more problems.
Google's DNS is set up to connect www.yourdomain.com.
Emphasis on the www dot.
With any modern website,
www dot isn't necessarily to type
as part of the URL anymore.
Websites always support both protocols.
So whether you type www.yourdomain.com,
or just yourdomain.com,
you end up in the right place.
So it's great that Google supports www dot,
but that's the only thing they support
for third party domains.
By default, yourdomain.com will not work
with the recommended DNS setup.
I had to establish my own URL,
redirect in CloudFlare for my top level domain,
to redirect www dot, to get this functionality working.
This is another pin point
that is not rocket science to solve,
but it does take some technical knowledge.
If you aren't tech savvy,
I would highly recommend purchasing your domain directly
from Google Domains to avoid this hassle.
If you already own your domain elsewhere,
you can transfer it to Google Domains at any time.
As long as your domain is in Google Domains,
you can easily connect it right away
and both www dot, and yourdomain.com work.
And it's no hassle.
You just say, hey, I wanna connect this domain.
Boom, you avoid all the headaches of third party domains,
which is a definite downside of Google Sites.
This brings us to the third thing I wanna highlight.
Google Sites shines as a landing page
for sharing resources from other Google products.
If you've ever wished you can embed Google Docs,
slides, sheets, forms, and charts, all on the same page.
Google Sites is for you.
It integrates seamlessly with Google's office type programs,
plus it works with YouTube and Google Calendar embeds.
You can also pull files directly from Google Drive,
but it only seems to work with images, videos,
or Google Docs.
I tried several times to insert a zip file,
or other obscure file type and nothing happened.
It didn't give me an error message.
It just simply didn't insert the file.
It's worth noting that there's nothing proprietary
about the way these Google products are embedded
on Google Sites.
You can go to any Google Docs file,
click publish to web and get embeddable HTML
for any site builder.
Google makes embedding items from your Google account,
ultra convenient and smooth,
but saving a few seconds here or there,
might not be worth the headaches and drawbacks
in other areas.
The fourth thing you need to know about Google Sites
is that there's no mobile app or mobile editor.
Forget building or modifying the Google site on your phone
because it's simply not possible.
The Google Sites editor will load on an iPad,
but functionality is glitchy at best.
It's clunky interacting with it on a smaller screen
and dragging elements around flat out doesn't work
in most cases.
Fortunately Google Sites are mobile responsive for visitors.
So you shouldn't have any issues there.
I'm personally an advocate for using a desktop
or laptop to build websites anyway.
So this doesn't bother me.
I thought I'd mentioned it though,
because it is nice to have the ability
to make quick edits on the go.
And finally, the fifth thing you need to know
before using Google Sites
is that there are no SEO optimization tools available.
Oh, the irony.
Google built a website builder
where you have zero control over SEO metadata
to adjust page titles and descriptions for search ranking.
I seriously can't get over how ironic this is.
In addition to the non-existent SEO optimization tools,
Google Sites also score poorly
on Google's own PageSpeed Insights ranking system.
My Google site got a score of 22 on mobile and 56 on desktop
or one of my WordPress websites got a score of 37 on mobile
and 79 on desktop.
And my Wix website got a score of 40 on mobile,
and 93 on desktop.
How is it that Google Sites builder scored the lowest
out of three site builders
in Google's own PageSpeed evaluation?
Google Sites honestly feels like an afterthought
and is a hard sell for many use cases.
Yes, it's 100% free.
Yes, you can connect a custom domain
and get free SSL functionality on your domain name.
But Google Sites comes with a lot of gotchas.
It has the simplicity of a website builder like Carrd,
but it's less practical without easy access
to contact forms or email lists opt-in forms.
Carrd isn't free to connect custom domains though.
And while it's budget friendly, starting at $9 a year,
it has similar shortcomings to Google
like a complicated DNS setup.
And unlike Google Sites,
Carrd is just for one page websites
and cannot have multiple pages.
Wix offers a forever free plan,
but you can't connect a custom domain
and will have some invasive Wix ads running on your website.
Wordpress.org is free,
but good luck finding solid, reliable,
free WordPress hosting.
If you don't mind spending a few bucks a month,
you can get web hosting and use a free WordPress theme
to build a pretty advanced website.
As for Google Sites,
I think it's optimal for users who want to embed
a lot of Google Documents on a basic landing page.
It's also one of the few truly free website builders
out there that lets you connect a custom domain
at no additional cost.
If that's important to you,
Google Sites may be worth exploring.
Just make sure you hold your domain name at Google Domains.
But in most scenarios,
I would not recommend using Google Sites
to build your website.
You'd be better off spending a few bucks per month
on WordPress hosting if you can swing it,
or using a solution like Carrd for basic landing pages.
So which website builder is your favorite?
Would you use it Google Sites to build your website?
Let me know in the comments down below.
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With that said, I will catch you guys next time.