Google Website Builder makes it easy to generate a user-friendly website using the content from your Google My Business profile. Depending on what you want to highlight for your website visitors, the “home page” can offer a variety of useful options.

To get started, you’ll want to go to navigate to the Google Website Builder page. On this page, you will search for your business’s listing. (It’s much easier to do this on a desktop computer while logged into your Google My Business account than on a phone or tablet.)

Once you’ve selected your business, you will see a preview of what your website could look like. It is just an early version that you can change later, so don’t worry if the colors, fonts, and images don’t perfectly match your brand.

You should see the option to “Get Your Free Website,” which you should click to proceed to the next step. Clicking this button can seem intimidating, but your site won’t be published and you won’t be replacing your current website if you have one.

Before you publish, you want to get your URL right. We suggest you play around with the preview tool a bit before you decide to go with a free website here. There are some nice benefits – it automatically updates based on your profile info,  you can choose buttons and photos and such – but it’s not as nice as you might get from a more custom website. Still, it is far better than no website, and it’s hard to complain about the price.

You have two URL options.

1. Google’s Free URL: If you use this URL, which you’ll see at the top of the page, your website will be free. It’s what’s called a subdomain. You may not like the look of it though. It works just like a regular website, but it’s just not uniquely yours, so you can’t use it in a branded email address.
2. A Custom Domain: If you already have a domain, or have one picked out, you can use that domain. To connect your custom domain, you’ll need it to be registered at Google Domains. They charge $12 / year for .com domains, which is a pretty good deal as far as domain registration goes. If you only have one domain there, it will show up automatically and you can “connect” your domain in a few steps. If your domain isn’t at Google, you’ll need to transfer it. That isn’t especially hard, but it does take a few steps, which are outlined here.

We recommend using a custom domain, as it feels more established to customers. Don’t push that “Publish” button yet. You have some more work to do.

One of the constraints of using a free website is that Google has organized your possible designs into a limited number of templates. Click on the artist palette icon to explore your options and find the best “look and feel” for your brand.

Once you find the template you like best, hit the checkbox above the themes and not the publish button. You just want to save your selection at this point.

Your next step is to change the main “action button” that users see when they visit your site. It’s really up to you as to what you choose to highlight here. If you offer bookings, point the button’s URL to your online bookings. If you want to trigger phone calls or messaging, you can choose those options instead. If you just want to provide directions, to your physical location, that’s a great choice as well.

It’s easy to miss what the “Summary Header” and “Summary Body” areas do, because you have to scroll down to see them on your site. These fields refer to a basic “About Us” section for your site. We recommend using the same text as the “About” text that you included on your Google My Business profile for the sake of consistency.

You can edit the summary text to add links or bullets if you’d like to add advanced formatting, but regular text is fine. Once you are done, hit the checkbox, not the Publish button.

When you click on the Photos button, you’ll have the opportunity to add photos to your website, but keep in mind they will also appear on your listing. If you want to delete any photos from your site, you’ll need to do so through your main Google My Business profile.

Some images that make sense on your Google Maps or Google Search profiles make less sense here. Note if you delete images, they lose their corresponding profile data, such as views, so don’t delete them unless you are ok with that.

Whether you want to publish or not depends on your individual business goals.

If you do not have a website, we recommend getting or transferring your domain to Google, and then publishing.

If you do already have a website that you don’t like, publishing might make sense too, but you will lose some of your traffic if your pages just disappear from the internet. So proceed with caution here. If you want a site upgrade it might make more sense to build a custom site using a builder like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly. You can then map your old urls to new ones so you don’t lose any traffic.

If you have a website you like, keep it! It will be better than this one.