Google sites - pros and cons


Google Sites is getting somewhere! Google gave it a big update last summer. It's definitely worth to take a closer look. So far I have created 3 sites with Google Sites. One of them is my band's site.

Pro's:

  • 100% ad-free all-in-one hosting solution 
  • Use your own domain (multiple domains are possible)
  • Sitesearch included by default
  • GDPR-compatible cookiewarning
  • Google analytics-ready
  • Easy to add a favicon, logo and branding
  • Various header& footer-options and sticky topmenu
  • Scroll-to-top icon
  • Very userfriendly and complete text and image editing
  • Intuitive placement of any element on a page, keeping it 100% responsive thanks to a powerful 12-column grid-system.
  • Pretty nice mobile hamburger menu (slide-in)
  • Neatless integration with all other Google products, like Youtube, Forms, Docs, Maps, etc
  • Easily add multiple editors for a given site or hand over its ownership
  • I expect a Google site to be SEO-optimized?
  • Free SSL certificate included
  • Forgot to mention: it's all free, free, free!

Cons:

  • Google Sites is not a CMS. It's a basic webpage builder. It's therefore not possible to use it as blog-engine, a newssite, an intranet portal, an e-commerce site nor as any other website where you need to manage lots of different types of content.
  • Images are not automatically resized/optimized for the web. Therefore sometimes images are loading too slow, causing a page to act weird before it's completely loaded.
  • I also miss a lightbox-plugin for images
  • No one-click add-ons like e-commerce, intranets, forum-plugins. Google sites are quite "basic". There is a way to embed any HTML-snippet though.
  • Not possible to develop plugins for your site
  • Not possible to apply custom CSS and/or add JavaScripts
  • Not possible to turn your site into a PWA (Progressive Web Application)
  • Very limited templating-capabilities. All you can play with are some colors, images, font-families and font-sizes.

All in all, I think Google beats Mobirise in some domains, especially when it comes to placement of elements. Mobirise is to limited when it comes to placing elements on a page. Especially Google's text-editor is pretty complete.  Mobirise adds more beauty, whistles and bells out of the box though.

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