Publishing a Notion Page as a Website (Notion Sites)

Yes — Notion Sites publishes any Notion page as a live website with a single click, free on a shared notion.site domain, or on your own custom domain if you're on a paid Notion plan and buy the domain add-on. It isn't a separate product: you build the page in Notion the normal way, then publish it from the same Share menu you already use to share a link. This guide covers the actual steps, what's gated by plan, the SEO settings Notion documents, and what a published page can't do, sourced from notion.com and the Notion Help Center.

How do I publish a Notion page as a website?

Notion's help documentation gives the steps directly: "Open the page you want to publish and select Share at the top. Open the Publish tab. Select Publish" (Notion Help, "Publish a Notion Site", checked September 2026). After that, selecting View site opens the live page, and Notion states that "as you make changes to the content in a published Notion page, the Site will update automatically" — there's no separate re-publish step for ordinary edits.

Any page qualifies, and Notion is direct about scope: "Any page you build in Notion can be turned into a beautiful Notion Site with just a click." This is a different mechanism from Notion's older, simpler sharing setting — the same help page flags that "making a Notion page public via Notion Sites is different from making a Notion page public using the Anyone on the web with link setting in a page's Share menu." Anyone on the web can view a page published through Notion Sites once it's live.

What does the free plan include, and what needs a paid plan?

Notion's help center lays out feature availability by plan directly. On the Free plan, you can "publish an unlimited number of Notion Sites," "claim one notion.site domain," and "turn on search engine indexing for your Sites" (Notion Help, "Notion Sites availability & pricing", checked September 2026). Paid plans add the ability to "claim up to five notion.site domains," "set a Homepage for your domains," "customize your Notion Sites," "integrate your Notion Sites with Google Analytics," and edit link titles and descriptions for search engine optimization. Paid plans also unlock the ability to connect existing custom domains, as a separate purchase covered below.

(Source: Notion Help, "Notion Sites availability & pricing", checked September 2026.)

What does the custom domain add-on cost, and what does it require?

A custom domain is a separate purchase layered on top of a paid Notion plan, and Notion is explicit that it doesn't sell the domain itself: "Notion doesn't sell custom domains or replace your current domain provider — the add-on allows you to use Notion Sites with a custom domain you already own" (same source). Pricing is stated directly: "they'll be charged an additional $10 per month," or, "with annual billing, you'll unlock a discounted rate for the custom domain add-on of an additional $8 per month." Each domain needs its own add-on purchase, "for up to 25 custom domains," and the add-on's billing cadence has to match your Notion plan's — annual Notion billing means annual add-on billing, and the same for monthly.

To actually connect one, Notion's setup guide gives the DNS steps: go to Settings → Sites, select New domain, choose Custom domain, enter a domain that includes a subdomain such as www.my-domain.com, add a CNAME record pointing to external.notion.site., add the TXT record Notion provides for verification, then select Verify (Notion Help, "Connect a custom domain with Notion Sites", checked September 2026). That page states the plan requirement plainly: "This feature is only available on paid plans."

How do I customize the site's URL slug?

On a paid plan, the pathname after your notion.site domain is yours to set. Notion's help center: "you can customize your Notion Site slug, which is the pathname that follows your domain. For example, in the URL notion.site/my-slug, my-slug would be the slug" (Notion Help, "Publish a Notion Site", checked September 2026). Rules apply: slugs "can be made up of letters, numbers, and hyphens," up to 60 characters, home pages can't have slugs at all, a slug doesn't automatically apply to subpages, and the same slug can't be reused across pages in one workspace — even across different domains. One irreversible detail worth planning around: "once you permanently delete a published page, its slug cannot be reused."

What SEO settings does Notion Sites give me?

Notion's own SEO controls sit under the same publish menu. To make a site discoverable, "Select Search engine indexing and toggle on Discoverable on the web to make your site searchable on the web" (same source). Paid plans get one step further: "you'll also be able to edit your link title and description for search engine optimization." Set expectations on timing, since Notion states plainly that "Notion Sites can take up to four weeks to be indexed and appear in search results" — that's Notion's own documented figure, not a guess.

What can't a published Notion Site do?

A few real, documented limits worth knowing before you build around Notion Sites as your main website:

• Subpages publish by default. Notion's help center warns: "Publishing a Notion page to the web means all of its subpages will be published too. Make sure all your page's subpages are good to go before you hit publish!" You can restrict individual subpage permissions afterward to keep specific ones private, but the default is everything goes public together.
• Contributor metadata is visible. Notion states that when you publish a page (or share it with Anyone on the web with link), "the webpage's metadata will include the names, profile photos, and email addresses associated with any Notion users that have contributed to the page" — worth checking before publishing a page multiple people edited.
• No password protection. Notion's own FAQ on password-protecting a published page is direct: "Unfortunately, not at the moment." The documented alternative for sharing something privately is inviting a specific person as a collaborator through Invite a person in the Share menu, not publishing it as a public Notion Site.
• An Enterprise admin can turn publishing off entirely. Notion documents that "workspace owners on the Enterprise Plan can choose to prevent Notion Sites from being published," and doing so takes down any Sites already live and also blocks sharing forms to the web.
• Unpublishing a Site doesn't automatically lock the underlying page. Notion's own guidance notes that even after you unpublish a Notion Site, the page's separate Anyone on the web with link sharing setting can still let anyone with that link view it — you have to turn that off separately, under Share, if you want the content fully private again.

What's the recovery path if I publish something by mistake?

Unpublishing is a Share-menu action, same place you published from: open the page, select Share, open the Publish tab, and select Unpublish. That takes the Notion Site itself offline. But because subpages publish together and a separate link-sharing toggle exists independently of the Notion Site status, treat unpublishing and making the page fully private as two different steps — check both the Publish tab and the general Anyone on the web with link setting if the goal is to fully remove public access, not just take down the Notion Site.

Where does Figment fit in?

Figment doesn't compete with Notion Sites directly — Notion Sites publishes a page built inside Notion's own block editor, while Figment publishes a website from a Figma design file through its Figma plugin. They serve different starting points: one begins with Notion's writing and database tools, the other with a visual layout you designed in Figma. If you want a single, simple public page and you're already living in Notion, Notion Sites is the more direct route; our guide to building a one-page website and Carrd's build guide cover two other single-page routes if Notion's block-based layout isn't what you need.

Bottom line: Notion Sites publishes any Notion page to the web from the same Share menu you already use, free on one notion.site domain with basic indexing, or with up to five domains, SEO editing, and a paid custom-domain add-on once you're on a paid plan. The real limits to plan around are documented ones: subpages publish along with the parent by default, contributor metadata shows in the public page, and unpublishing the Notion Site is a separate step from removing the page's general web-link access.