Turn Sites on or off for users

If you have Essentials edition, classic Sites are not available.

As an administrator, you can turn classic and new Sites on or off for people in your organization. People who have classic and new Sites turned on can use it to create and manage websites at your organization’s web address.

Using multiple domains? People in all your domains can use Sites. For details, see Add multiple domains or domain aliases.

Control who uses classic and new Sites in your organization

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. From the Admin console Home page, go to AppsGoogle WorkspaceSites.
3. Click Service status.

4. To turn on or off a service for everyone in your organization, click On for everyone or Off for everyone, and then click Save.

5. (Optional) To turn a service on or off for an organizational unit:

   1. At the left, select the organizational unit.
   2. Select On or Off.
   3. Click Override to keep your setting if the service for the parent organizational unit is changed.
   4. If Overridden is already set for the organizational unit, choose an option:
      • Inherit—Reverts to the same setting as its parent.
      • Save—Saves your new setting (even if the parent setting changes).

   Learn more about organizational structure.

6. To turn on a service for a set of users across or within organizational units, select an access group. For details, go to turn on a service for a group.

Impact of turning off Sites access

If the Sites service is turned off:

• An error message is displayed to users indicating that they don't have access to Sites and should contact their domain administrator to provide access.
• Users can't access existing Sites, pages, or a list of all sites.
• The classic Sites API doesn't work.
• Site project files aren’t deleted, but they can’t be accessed. If Sites is turned back on, people can access their site project files.

Disable creating classic Sites

We recommend you disable creating classic Sites, because new Sites is replacing it. Learn more about the Transition from classic Sites to new Sites.

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. From the Admin console Home page, go to AppsGoogle WorkspaceSites.
3. Click Sharing settings - classic Sites.
4. Under Site creation and editing click Site creation.
5. You can disable classic Site creation by clicking Users at <your domain> cannot create sites  Save.

Alternatively, if you still want users to be able to create in classic Sites, select Users at <your domain> can create sites and click Save. By June 2022, Migrate classic Sites to new Sites.

Next steps

• For new Sites, you can enable new site creation and editing. Learn more
• For classic Sites, you can: 
  • Set sharing options to specify whether users can create their own sites. Learn more
  • Enable viewers to comment on sites. Learn more