Your free Google website is gone — what's next for your business online

If your business had a website ending in business.site, it's gone now. Google shut down the websites it generated from Business Profiles on 5 March 2024, and the redirects from those addresses back to the profile stopped working on 10 June 2024 — since then, the link leads nowhere. Google gave both dates in a Business Profile help notice, which today survives only in the web archive.

The good news: the profile itself still works fine. Only the generated website disappeared. Below: how to check whether this affects you, what exactly was lost, and three realistic ways forward — with real prices from the Polish market, not a vague "from PLN 500" range.

How to check in a minute whether this affects you

The address of that website always ended in business.site (or negocio.site). Check the four places it might still be lurking:

1. The "website" field in your Business Profile — if there's still an address in that domain there, a customer who clicks it hits a dead end.
2. Business cards, leaflets, van signage — print doesn't update itself.
3. Email footers and signatures — the most commonly forgotten spot.
4. Old campaigns and directory listings — local business directories, industry listings, anywhere you were listed.

If that address isn't anywhere, this doesn't affect you — but read on anyway, because the question "is the profile enough on its own?" still stands.

What was lost, and what stayed

Stayed: the whole Business Profile — name, category, address, hours, phone number, photos and, most importantly, every review. It was always a separate thing from the website, and it wasn't affected.

Lost: the generated website, any descriptions you wrote into it by hand, and the address itself. Google doesn't hand back these domains or offer a redirect — you can't "carry over" the old address, only fix the links in the places you control.

Three ways forward

1. Stick with just the profile

For some businesses this isn't a compromise — it's the right answer. If you sell one service in one area and customers call after seeing your reviews anyway, the profile does the whole job. It costs nothing and needs about an hour a month.

When it's not enough: when your offer can't be described in a couple of sentences, when you need a form that takes an attachment, or when you want to show a price list customers can actually compare.

2. An off-the-shelf system — the cheapest route to a real website

WordPress or a website builder. From our report on website costs in Poland (112 observations from 80 sources): the median WordPress build costs PLN 3,600, based on 78 observations — the strongest sample in the whole set. A simple brochure site comes in cheaper: a median of PLN 2,500.

For that money you get your own address, control over the content, and something the free Google website never gave you: a website that actually belongs to you.

3. A website built specifically for you

The median is PLN 5,900 (39 observations). This option comes into play when the site has to actually do something: drive traffic to a form, explain a complex service, showcase finished work. The difference from option two isn't the technology — it's how much work goes into content and layout.

If you're not sure which of these three tiers fits you, our comparison of website types settles it in three questions.

What you can't do

Redirecting the old address. This comes up most, and the answer is inconvenient: no, you can't. The business.site domain was never yours, and Google offers no redirect mechanism. All you can do is fix the link everywhere you placed it yourself — starting with the "website" field in your profile.

Recovering the content. If you wrote service descriptions into that site, there's nowhere to pull them back from. Check the Wayback Machine — the archive sometimes has a copy from before the shutdown, so you can copy the text back out.

What the business.site shutdown teaches

The free website looked like the perfect solution for a business with no time for one: zero cost, zero setup, an address to hand out to customers. It ended the way services built on someone else's infrastructure tend to end — the address stopped working because the provider decided so, and the owner had no say in it.

The lesson isn't "don't use free tools." It's: don't build your business address on somebody else's domain. A Google profile is a good place to be found — but the place you send customers to should be yours. Your own domain costs little per year, and it's the one thing here nobody can switch off on you.

What to do today

1. Check the "website" field in your Business Profile — if there's a business.site address there, remove or replace it.
2. Go through the four places from the list at the start.
3. Decide between the three routes above — and if you're going with a website, start with the domain before you pick who builds it.