Google Sites Free Plan (2026): Almost No Fine Print to Read

The Google Sites free plan is the easiest fine-print assignment we have ever taken, because for once there is barely any fine print to read. Google Sites has no paid tier, no upgrade banner, no pricing page — a free plan with no ladder propped against it. In an industry where “free” usually means “watermarked until further notice,” that alone deserves a headline.

It deserves a headline; it does not deserve uncritical applause. What follows is the honest accounting — what the free plan includes, the one genuinely rare privilege it grants, and the ceiling you will eventually bump your head on.

What the free plan includes

Everything, in the trivial sense that there is nothing else to buy. Any Google account publishes at sites.google.com/view/sitename — note that this is a path on Google's domain, not a subdomain of your own name, so the free URL is tidy but unmistakably borrowed. The structural allowances are so high they read as trivia: up to 10,000 pages per site, 15,000 images, character limits in the tens of millions. New accounts are initially capped at five new sites per week, which inconveniences approximately nobody. For how these numbers compare across the field, see our ledger of what “free” actually includes on 10 website builders.

No ads — and what “no ads” means here

No banners, no upgrade nags, no advertising on published pages — full stop. At the time of checking, the only marking we could establish on a published consumer site is a small footer bar, a “Made with Google Sites” line with a report-abuse link. That is closer to a byline than a billboard, and it is quieter than anything Wix, Jimdo or GoDaddy put on a free page. If ad-free is your hard requirement, the honest field is small; we surveyed the whole of it in free website builders without ads.

The custom-domain exception

Here is the clause that separates Google Sites from every mainstream rival: it connects a custom domain for $0. Settings, then Custom domains, then Start setup — documented by Google itself — and it works on personal Gmail accounts, with up to five custom domains per site. Conditions, because there are always conditions: the site must be published publicly, and on managed Workspace accounts the option stays hidden unless an administrator enables it. Still, every other builder in our index treats domain connection as the paywall itself. The various “free domain, year one” offers elsewhere are a different animal entirely — we dissect those in free website builder with a free domain.

The Workspace connection

Google Sites is less a website builder than a publishing surface for Drive. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Calendar drop into pages as living embeds, and for a team handbook, a club schedule or a project dashboard, that is precisely the right design. Collaboration works the way Docs collaboration works, because it is Docs collaboration. If your organisation already lives in Workspace, the site edits itself from the files you were maintaining anyway — a genuine advantage no drag-and-drop rival replicates. The reverse also holds: if your life is not already inside Google's ecosystem, the integration buys you little, and the editor left standing is a modest arranger of text boxes and embeds. Workspace customers get the same product with their own storage and admin controls; the builder itself does not change, and neither does its price of nothing.

The ceiling

Now the honest part. The templates are rigid, and the output has a distinct look — tidy, legible, and unmistakably institutional. A Google Site tends to read as an intranet page even when it is your public homepage, and there is no theming lever that fully fixes it. There is no ecommerce of any kind. There are no real forms, only embedded Google Forms, which arrive wearing Google's styling rather than yours. There is no custom code and no head injection, which forecloses analytics snippets, pixels and third-party widgets. None of this is fine print — it is simply where the product stops.

That is not a complaint about the price; it is a boundary marking. If what you actually need at $0 is a design tool — typography, layout control, output that could pass for commissioned work — Framer's free plan is the strongest of that breed in our index, badge and bandwidth cap notwithstanding, with a paid exit at $10 a month billed yearly. Different instrument, different job.

Storage: the number nobody publishes

Google does not state a per-site storage figure for the current product, and we will not invent one. Our best reading is that site assets draw on your account's shared 15 GB Drive quota; the “100 MB per site” number still circulating on review sites appears to be a leftover from the retired classic Sites. Treat storage as roomy but undocumented — and treat any review quoting an exact figure with suspicion, ours included if Google ever publishes the real number.

The catch

Even here, we found one. As we read Google's inactive-account policy, an account left untouched for around two years can be slated for deletion, content included — which would take an abandoned hobby site down with it. Sign in occasionally; that is the whole defence. The second catch is the absence of a ladder: there is nowhere to grow. Workspace, from $7 per user per month, buys storage and team features, not design freedom, so when you outgrow Google Sites you do not upgrade — you leave and rebuild elsewhere. On the brighter side, this is one of the few free plans where “forever” survives scrutiny; compare the field in how long you can stay on a free plan.

Verdict: who should actually use it

Our 8.5 rates the free tier, and on that measure nothing touches it: this is the one free plan whose terms we could read without reaching for the highlighter. It tops our ranking of the best free website builders for exactly that reason. Use it for an internal site, a club, a society, a documentation hub, or any project where the budget is zero and the aesthetic bar is “clean.” Skip it if you are building a brand, selling anything, or need a design that could not be mistaken for a staff portal. And if you would rather have the opposite trade — a maximal editor wrapped in maximal strings — our Wix free plan review reads the other end of the spectrum.