Google Sites Classic To Shut Down On 30 Jan 2023

Google has announced many big changes in the last few months. It is making Google Workspace more feature-packed while dropping some of the apps. The Google Chat app replaced Hangouts, and single Workspace accounts now have one TB of free storage. Moreover, Google is shutting down Google Sites Classic to make way for the new Sites functionality.

This news isn’t abrupt. Google has been planning the change and informing the users for quite some time. But 30 January 2023 will mark the end of Classic Sites, which won’t work anymore and will be converted to new sites automatically.

What is Google Classic Sites & Why is it shutting down?

Google Sites Classic offers a means to create a website using a drag-and-drop website builder. As expected, it is fairly easy to create a website using this service, and all the site data is stored on your Google Drive account. However, Google will drop the classic sites and introduce new ones which are beautiful, functional, and align with the latest design approach. New Google sites were launched way back in 2017 with plans of migrating the classic sites to the new model in a phased manner.

That was five years ago. Since then, Google has extended the timeline multiple times to facilitate easy migration and even offers tools to download the classic site’s archive. But after 30 January, you won’t be able to make changes to the Classic sites until they are automatically converted. You can view them until they undergo the conversion. After January 30, 2023, Google will convert classic Sites to new Site drafts. Site owners can review the new drafts and then publish them after making some or no changes to these drafts.

Moreover, Google will export static archives to Google Takeout so that you can use them to create new sites or modify them. After doing these two things, Google will delete all the classic sites created by you. All this won’t happen in a couple of days and it could take months to migrate the old sites to the new format. Also, you will receive a notification about the migration once it is complete.