Thinking about building a website on Notion? You may want to reconsider. While it’s fantastic for creating a to-do list, building a wiki and taking and storing notes, it doesn’t rival a tool like Squarespace or WordPress when it comes to creating a website.
But before we dive into that, the first thing we need to remember is that Notion doesn’t support custom domains out of the (virtual) box, so it’s stumbling at the first hurdle. There are some workarounds that’ll let you do it, but it has its limitations.
Most of these restrictions are rooted in Notion’s architecture. You can’t create a custom sitemap, for example, and there’s limited options when it comes to customization and development — something even so-called Notion Website Builders suffer with.
If you’re building a blog for personal use, Notion — via a Notion Website Builder like Super — could work, but we wouldn’t recommend it. Creation is too manual and if you want to stand a chance at your content being discoverable on Google, it’s confusing.
It also isn’t free. Review the Notion pricing structure and you’ll learn you need to hand over $4 per month to have Google index your content. Pairing with it website builder, which start at $10 per month, it isn’t the cheapest way to build a website.
The best setup with a website created on Squarespace or one developed using WordPress with Yoast SEO, so you can easily optimize your website at the most basic level for search engines like Bing and Google. Notion lacks a lot of these features.
And let’s not forget about plugins. These add-ons let you add new, pre-built features to your website without typing a single line of code — something Notion is missing. Sure, there are Notion templates for visuals, to rival themes, but it’s not the same.
The only time I could ever see myself using Notion to create a website would be to share a Wiki I’ve created with a group of people, and to do that I’d purchase a custom domain then point it to a public Workspace so it would automatically redirect there.
For example, I could set the productivityandmorewiki.com domain to redirect productivityandmore.notion.site, so contributors don’t need to remember (or type) the .notion.site extension, streamlining access to the documentation.
