Your .business.site website is gone, and it is not coming back. Google switched off websites made with Business Profiles on March 5, 2024, then cut the forwarding on June 10, 2024. Type that old address today and you get a page not found error.
What Google did, and the exact dates
Google Business Profile Help published a page called “Websites made with Google Business Profiles are turned off.” The wording was plain.
“As of March 5, 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles are no longer available and customers that visit your site will be redirected to your Business Profile instead.”
The same page set the end of that grace period. “Your customers will only be redirected to your Business Profile until June 10, 2024. After that, customers will get a ‘Page not found’ error when they try to visit your website.”
Count the days between March 5 and June 10, 2024 for yourself. It is 97. That was the whole window a plumber or a roofer had to notice the change and send his customers somewhere else.
That page also said domains ending in business.site and negocio.site were removed from the website field on the Business Profile. The link did not just break. It was taken off the profile.
Two other things sat in that announcement. Ad campaigns pointed at one of these sites would be interrupted on March 5. And anyone who had bought a real domain and forwarded it to the free site lost that forwarding on June 10 as well.
What survived and what did not
Google was clear that the profile itself stayed. “Other than that, your Business Profiles aren’t affected.”
This survived:
- Your Business Profile, with its name, address, hours, phone number, photos and reviews.
- Your listing on the map.
This did not:
- The website pages, and every word and photo on them.
- The .business.site address, and any search results pointing at it.
- The website link on your profile.
- Forwarding from your own domain to that site.
Nothing in that announcement offered a way to download the pages you had written. No export was mentioned anywhere on it. If you never kept your own copy of the text and the photos, that writing is gone. Holding your own copy of a site is a subject with its own gaps, and worth reading before you trust anyone else to keep it for you.
Why this is harder to verify than it should be
Here is the limit in the evidence above, said straight.
Google’s live help article no longer carries that notice. Ask for article 14368911 today and Google hands you a different article, number 3039617, titled “Edit your Business Profile,” with nothing about a shutdown on it. The older article, number 7032839, was called “Get started on a website with Google.” It now lands on that same replacement page.
Every quote from that notice comes from a copy of Google’s page saved by the Internet Archive on March 5, 2024. The words are Google’s own. You cannot go to Google today and read them.
That is worth sitting with for a second. The company that turned off the website later stopped publishing the notice that explained it. Search for what happened now and you mostly get marketing blogs repeating each other. If somebody quotes you a date for this, ask them where they read it.
The part that was never really yours
A free website on somebody else’s platform is a rented room. You can paint it. You do not own the building.
The same thing happens further down, under the site. Squarespace announced on September 7, 2023 that it had completed its purchase of Google Domains assets. Squarespace’s own help page, last updated May 28, 2026, puts it this way: “On September 7, 2023, Squarespace acquired all domain registrations and their associated customer accounts from Google Domains.” Nobody was asked first. The same page tells anyone who had no Squarespace account that one was made for them, using the email address on the Google account.
The one piece a trade business can really hold is the domain name. Register it in your own name, on your own card, at a registrar you can log into yourself. Then keep the renewal paid.
Miss that renewal and the clock is short. ICANN, the body that oversees domain names, publishes an Expired Registration Recovery Policy, updated February 21, 2024. It says the registries behind endings like .com must offer a “Redemption Grace Period” of “30 days immediately following the deletion of a registration,” and that registrars “must permit the RAE to redeem a deleted registration during RGP.” RAE is their word for whoever held the name when it expired. Read the timing closely. Those thirty days start after your registrar deletes the name, not on the day it expires. The same policy makes a registrar publish its renewal fees and its redemption or restore fees, so pulling a name back costs money on top of the renewal.
This is not legal or tax advice. Your domain registration and your hosting agreement are contracts, and contract rules are set state by state. If the name on your truck is also the name in that domain, have an attorney in your own state read them before you sign or cancel anything.
Which ending to register, .com or a trade ending, is its own decision and changes none of the above.
What to do next
If your .business.site address vanished, work in this order.
- Fix your Business Profile first. Sign in and put a working website address in the website field. If you have no site yet, point it at any page you control. An empty field sends nobody anywhere.
- Check your ads. Any campaign still aimed at the dead address is either spending nothing or spending badly.
- Register a domain in your own name. Not your nephew’s account. Not an agency’s account.
- Search your own business name and town on a phone. Write down what you actually see. That is your real starting point.
- Then, and only then, decide about a website.
Now the honest part about buying anything.
If you already have a working website on your own domain, and the only thing that broke was the link on your profile, you do not need to buy a thing. Fix the field. That takes five minutes and costs nothing at all.
If you never had a website beyond the free one, you do need somewhere for that link to go. A site built as plain files, on a domain in your own name, is far harder for anyone to switch off. The files are yours to copy and move. That is the build, and what it costs each month sits on the pricing page rather than buried in an article.
No article can promise you calls. What it can tell you is where your website lives, and who is holding the switch.