We sell a competing product, so weigh this accordingly. Google Sites is also genuinely useful. For a team wiki, a class page, an internal handbook or a project hub, it's free, it's quick, and it plugs straight into Docs, Sheets and Drive. Nothing here beats that for internal work.

The problem is what happens when the site has to do business.

The design ceiling arrives fast

Google Sites gives you a small fixed set of themes and a narrow set of building blocks. Text, images, buttons, embeds, a few layout sections that snap to a grid. You can adjust things a little. You cannot make an arbitrary layout.

Which means every Google Sites site looks like a Google Sites site. That's harmless internally. Externally it reads as unfinished, and if you're asking someone to hire you or pay you, that impression is doing work you didn't intend.

There's no path in from a design tool either. You can't bring a Figma layout across. Whatever you designed gets approximated inside Google's blocks, and that approximation is now your website while your actual design sits in a file nobody opens again.

The custom domain situation, correctly

A lot of articles claim you need a paid Google Workspace plan to use a custom domain with Google Sites. As far as I can tell that's wrong, and I'd rather correct it than repeat it.

You can map a custom domain from a free personal Google account. The real restriction is that you can't use the naked apex domain. It has to be a subdomain, so www.yoursite.com works and yoursite.com does not. You also verify ownership through Search Console and add a CNAME, and the site has to be published publicly or the custom address just redirects back to the sites.google.com URL.

Worth knowing: managed school or work accounts don't get the personal custom-domain route. And Workspace itself starts at $7 per user per month if you want it for other reasons.

Without a domain, your site lives at sites.google.com/view/your-site-name, which is not an address anyone puts on a business card.

Stay on Google Sites if

The site is internal. Team documentation, an intranet page, a resource hub for a class or a club. Google Sites is built for exactly that and it's free.

Stay if the site's job is to hold embedded Google content and nothing more. Stay if nobody outside your organization will ever judge you by it.

And stay if you don't use Figma, because Figment is a Figma plugin and there's nothing for us to publish without that file.

What Figment does

You design the site in Figma, which is free to use. The plugin publishes your frames as a real website on your own domain, apex included, in under a minute. To update it, you change the Figma file and publish again.

No block library, no grid that collapses in a way you didn't choose, no theme. The layout is whatever you drew.

If you've never designed a site before, start from a Figma community template and put your own content in. That gets you further than any Google Sites theme will.

What you get that Google Sites doesn't offer

A site that looks designed, because it is. You own the Figma file outright and can take it anywhere. Zero drift between the design and what's live. Updates are design edits. Publishing takes under a minute. Your own domain including the apex. The canvas stays open in a form AI can genuinely operate on. And the product has been running since 2021, with 31,402 sites built and 20,048 published.

The honest side: we have no CMS and no animation engine, and we cost money. Free tier publishes to a subdomain with a "Built with Figment.so" badge, then it's $29/mo Pro or $89/mo Team with a 30-day trial. Google Sites is free forever. If free is the requirement, that's the answer and no comparison page changes it.

Moving across

Copy your text out of each page and download your images. Screenshot the pages if the structure is worth keeping.

Then design it properly in Figma, a desktop and mobile frame per page. Don't trace the Google Sites layout, since escaping it is the point. Install the Figment plugin, publish, review the live URL, then point your domain. Leave the old site up until the new one answers.

On AI

We're building an AI website builder that works on your open Figma canvas rather than inside a closed editor. It's in early access, not generally available yet. To see Figment and get on the early access list, request a demo.

Not sure your site needs the upgrade? Describe it on Discord and I'll tell you if staying put is fine.