Image: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay
Google has announced that it will be shutting down the free, basic websites made with information from your Business Profiles.
If you have a website via Business Profiles, you need to take action to create an alternative or redirect elsewhere by June this year.
From March 2024, users visiting your site made with Google Business Profile will be redirected to your Business Profile instead. The redirect will be in place until 10 June 2024 after which users will see a “page not found” error.
The move affects domains ending in business.site and negocio.site and leaves siteowners just six months to reorganise their web presence. To ensure a smooth transition, owners should create a new site and then update their Business Profile with the new website address before the deadline.
Google suggested the following website builders to create a new site for your business: Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Google Sites, Shopify, WordPress.
If you have an Ads campaign connected to an affected website, you should update your ads to link to an alternative website before 1 March 2024 to keep them running. Alternatively, you can pause them.
If you’re using a custom domain name to forward traffic to an affected website, visitors will be redirected to your Business Profile. Again, the redirect will only work until 10 June 2024. Google advises you to redirect your third party domain (via your hosting company) to a different website before this date.
For more detail, see Google’s post on Business Profile help.
