What happened to the free Google websites
For years, the profile dashboard had a website builder: pick a theme, and Google turned your profile’s details into a simple site. Google’s help page, as archived in January 2024, said creating them was no longer supported, the existing ones would be turned off in March 2024, and visitors would be redirected to the Business Profile until June 10, 2024. After that date the redirect stopped.
If you never had one, nothing changed for you. If you did, anyone who clicks an old link, a business card or a printed flyer with that address now lands nowhere.
What to check on your profile today
- Search Google for your business name, sign in, and choose “Edit profile”.
- Open the contact details and look at the website field.
- If it holds an old Google-made address, replace it with your own site. If you have no site yet, remove the link rather than leave a dead one.
- Look for the old address on your Facebook page, your directory listings, your van and your business cards.
What a profile does, and what a website does
The profile is the listing: it puts you on the map, shows your hours, photos and reviews, and gives people a button to call or get directions. Google decides its layout, and you fill in the fields Google offers.
A website is yours. It can have a page for every service you want more of, a page for each town you cover, your prices or price ranges, a quote form, online booking, before-and-after photos and the story of how you work. Each of those pages can show up in Google’s ordinary results for its own search. Links from other sites to yours also count toward the prominence Google uses in local ranking.
The two work together. The profile gets you seen on the map; the website is where a customer who wants to know more ends up, and where Google looks for detail about what you do.
What changed for one shop
An aircraft paint shop near Los Angeles had a website on a builder template: a stock photo, a cookie banner over the first screen, and no word about paint or interiors. Its profile could only link to that page. When we measured seven searches for its work on October 26, 2026, the old site was not in the top 100 for any of them. The new site has a page for each kind of work, the shop’s own airplane on the first screen and the call button where a phone user finds it.
Your options for a site
- A builder you run yourself, such as Wix or Squarespace. Cheapest in money, and you do the writing, the photos and the search settings.
- A freelancer or an agency builds it for a one-off fee, with care and changes usually billed by the month after launch.
- A monthly plan where one team builds the site, sets up the profile and keeps both current.
Prices for each, with sources, are in our guide to what a small business website costs. Our own is the third kind: see our website plan, which includes setting up your Business Profile. If you already have a site and want the profile and local search looked after, that is our local SEO plan.
