Wix vs Google Sites: when the simple option is enough

Google Sites is enough when you need a few simple pages that share information: a project page, an event page, an internal team site, a club or classroom site. It works like Google Docs, it lives in Google Drive, and Google lists no price for it. It is not built for marketing a business. Google's help pages describe no blog, no store, no built-in contact form, and very few search engine settings.

Wix is a full website builder. It has a free plan with real limits and paid plans from $17 per month on yearly billing, as of October 2026. It gives you design control, a blog, a store, bookings, forms and a full set of SEO settings. That also means more to learn and more to pay for.

Google documents much less about Sites than Wix does about its product. Where Google's own pages are silent, this guide says so instead of guessing.

What each product is

Google Sites is one of the apps in Google Workspace, alongside Docs, Sheets and Drive. A new site starts from a blank page or the template gallery, is saved to Drive like any other file, and is not public until you publish it. Google's product page positions Sites for sharing information with a team, and adds that people outside your company can view a site without a Workspace account.

Wix is a hosted website platform for businesses. It offers more than 2,000 templates and three editors: the Wix Editor, the newer Wix Harmony Editor, and the Studio Editor for professional designers. Around the editor sits a set of business apps: Wix Stores, Wix Bookings, Wix Blog, Wix Forms, email marketing and a contact database.

Cost

Wix's displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full up front; its month-to-month prices appear at checkout. See Wix's plans page for current figures.

Google Sites can still cost money. Google's custom domain help page says "You can purchase a new domain for Google Sites through a Google Workspace plan", and that "The default subscription plan is Business Standard." As of October 2026, Google's Workspace pricing page shows Business Starter at $7, Business Standard at $14 and Business Plus at $22 per user per month with a one-year commitment. Google also runs time-limited promotional prices for new customers, so check the Workspace pricing page for the standard rate.

If you are weighing the two free options, our guide to what the free Wix plan can and can't do lists every limit, and Wix plans compared covers the paid tiers.

Design and editing

Google Sites keeps design simple on purpose. You choose a theme made by Google or build a custom theme with your own logo, banner image, color palette and fonts. Pages are built from inserts and "Content Blocks" layouts that you drag onto the page: text, images, image carousels, buttons, collapsible text, a table of contents. Google's product page describes an automatic grid layout that scales to any device.

The limits Google documents:

• Navigation can sit at the top or the left. With a pre-made theme, the menu color options are Transparent, White or Black.
• Pages can nest up to 5 levels deep.
• Uploaded images must be .jpg, .png or .gif.
• You can view a site on a phone or tablet, but "When you edit your site, you must use a computer."

Google does not publish a count of templates or themes, or a maximum number of pages per site.

Wix goes much further on design. The Wix Editor lets you place elements freely and adjust a separate mobile view, and the Studio Editor adds breakpoints and CSS grid tools. The cost of that freedom is time: there is more to set up and more that can go wrong, especially on mobile.

Collaboration is a strength of Google Sites. You share a site the way you share a Doc, editors can work at the same time, and owners can stop editors from publishing.

Domains and web addresses

On Google Sites, the web address is set when you publish and can be changed later in the publish settings. You can connect up to five custom domains to one site, only the site owner can connect a domain, and changes can take up to 48 hours to appear. Each page gets a path you can customize.

The detail that catches people out is this line from Google's help: "Publishing a custom path to a page or renaming a page will create a new URL and might affect data tracking with Analytics." Google describes no redirect feature for Sites. If other websites link to a page and you rename it, plan for those links to stop working. Google's pages also do not state whether HTTPS is set up automatically on a custom domain, so test it after you connect one.

On Wix, a custom domain requires a paid plan. When you change a URL, you can set a 301 redirect, which is a permanent forwarding instruction that sends visitors and search engines from the old address to the new one. Wix keeps these in the URL Redirect Manager, with a maximum of 5,000 redirects per site.

SEO controls

This is the widest gap between the two, and the place where Google's silence matters most.

Google Sites pages can still appear in Google search, and Google may handle some of these items behind the scenes. But Sites help gives you no setting for them.

The one search setting Google documents is in the publish settings: "Request public search engines to not display my site." Google adds that "This is a request and doesn't guarantee that your site won't show up in public search engines." It applies to the whole site. There is no documented way to hide a single page from search.

Search Console, Google's free tool for monitoring how a site appears in search, works with both. Google's verification guide says a Google Site without a custom domain must be verified with the Google Analytics tracking code method, and a site with a custom domain uses the HTML tag method. The same guide also says ownership "will be verified automatically" when you sign in to Search Console with the Google Account that owns the site, so try that first. For Wix, see connecting Wix to Google Search Console.

Wix's SEO settings are covered in depth in Wix SEO settings: titles, descriptions and defaults, and we give an honest overall assessment in is Wix good for SEO.

Business features

Google's help index for Sites shows no blog or post feature, no online store or checkout, no membership feature and no email marketing. What Sites does well is embed other Google tools: Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms, Charts, YouTube videos, calendars and maps. A contact form on a Google Site is a Google Form placed on the page, with responses collected in Google Forms.

Wix builds these features in:

• Blog: Wix Blog, with its own SEO settings.
• Store: Wix Stores, with up to 50,000 products on Core and above.
• Forms: Wix Forms, with 4 forms on the free plan and Light, rising to 75 on Business Elite. Submissions create contacts automatically.
• Email marketing: 200 emails a month free, with paid upgrades.

If your site needs to capture leads, sell, take bookings or publish articles regularly, that list is the reason to choose Wix or another full website platform.

Moving your content later

Neither product lets you pick up a finished site and host it elsewhere. Google Sites data is included in Google's data export for Drive, though Google lists what the export includes and not its file format, so don't assume it will import into another builder. Wix states that a site must be hosted on Wix's servers; you can export CMS collections, store products and redirects as CSV files, but not the design or blog posts. Wix does not support importing a site built elsewhere, so moving from Google Sites to Wix means rebuilding the pages by hand. For a small site that is mostly copying and pasting.

Choose Google Sites if, choose Wix if

Choose Google Sites if:

• You need an internal site, a project hub, a class or club page, or a short-lived event page.
• Your content already lives in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Calendar, and you mainly want to present it.
• Several people need to edit, and they already know Google's tools.
• You do not depend on search engines to bring you customers.

Choose Wix if:

• The site's job is to win customers through search, ads or social media.
• You need a blog, a store, bookings, lead forms or email marketing.
• You want control over titles, descriptions, redirects and structured data.
• You want design control beyond a theme and a set of content blocks.

There is also a third answer. If you expect to outgrow a simple builder quickly, or you need full ownership of your code and hosting, neither may be the right long-term home. Our guide on when Wix is the right choice helps you place your project.

Conclusion

Google Sites and Wix are not really competitors. Google Sites is a quick way to publish information for people who already know where to find it. Wix is a way to build a business website that has to attract visitors, convert them and be managed over time. If the site has to bring in business, start on a platform with the SEO and marketing controls to do it. If you'd like help setting up a Wix site properly from day one, see our Wix website services. More guides are in our Wix hub.

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