Build a website with Notion

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Notion is lots of people's favourite app to take notes - that sounds pretty obvious in the app's name, right? Moreover, people also love Notion because of its simplicity.

Though, there is way more to love about Notion, and that's because you can build your very next website within Notion.so, and it's all 100% free. For more about that, check out the Notion website builder.

Can you use Notion as a CMS?

Yes, each of your Notion page can be turned into a website, and you can use that as your CMS.

Notion is a very good and easy to use CMS, and you can build beautiful and professional websites without having to hassle like on any of the other old website builders.

Why use Notion as a CMS?

But, back to our business, Notion can host a website as powerful and as efficient as any other CMS. Think of Notion being as reliable as (or many even better) WordPress or Wix.

Let's look at the main reasons why you should consider using Notion as your CMS.

1. Notion CMS means no code

To use notion as your next CMS, you don't even need to code. All of the changes to your websites are made right inside of Notion.

Your CMS and backend is basically a Notion page designated to be your website.

To change things on your website, you just have to add and/or remove blocks. The best part is that you don't even need to code to use Notion.

A Notion website works just as a normal Notion page, though.... It is a website!

2. Minimalistic websites

Notion gives the huge advantage of tidy websites. The same interface that the Notion app gives when you're making new pages will be given to your website as well.

What's not to love about a minimalistic website? As we always say, it's really hard to make a Notion page look ugly.

The classic all-white page will be your next website. You know what's even better? The fact that a Notion-built website has dark mode available.

That is an example of a Notion website built with Simple.ink, and held in dark mode. Any user can change that according to their preference: light or dark mode.

3. Head start templates

In case you're finding it difficult designing your website, fear not, a Notion website has you covered even in this situation.

If you've used Notion before, then you might know how there is a way to duplicate other pages. That's why we've built a library of Notion website templates that are 100% free to use.

You don't necessarily have to use our templates to start your website - what we're trying to prove here is the fact that a Notion website can be built without even designing it.

Whatever Notion template you find on the internet and is duplicatable, you can transform it into your website.

4. Notion websites pair with integrations

Integrating is one of the most fun parts of building notion websites.

You can integrate any of your favourite tools inside a Notion website. That's right, anything that's got an integration code, an embeddable code or an embeddable URL!

Yet again, we have a library of apps to integrate in Notion, and we also teach you how to do that.

Within your Notion website, you can integrate the most useful tools, such as: live chat, customer feedback, social media, cookies and so on.

One of the most important apps that you can integrate is anything that gives you stats on your website.

For instance, an app that works great for stats is Google Analytics. Feel free to use whatever you like the most!

5. Notion as a CMS is totally free

So, as most of you may know by now, Notion is a totally free tool. So is building your Notion website with Simple.ink!

If you want to see more about the pricing of Notion, check out our Notion pricing page where we compare Notion's plans and explain them.

With this being said, your Notion page and your Notion website built with Simple.ink are free of cost, and with a free website, you get loads of advantages!

Is Notion worth using as a CMS?

Notion is worth using as a CMS because it brings loads of advantages. For instance, you don't have to worry about going through tens of page editors to make a few changes - you just have to go to your Notion page and make your changes. It's that easy!

Shortly, here are 5 of the reasons why we think that you should use Notion as a CMS:

1. No need to know anything about coding
2. You'll build clean and minimalistic pages
3. There are loads of free templates to start with
4. Integrations work perfectly with Notion
5. Building a Notion website is 100% free

We hope that this brings any help and that you've got the main idea of why you should think of using Notion.so as your next CMS.

Thank you for reading this post!

We've made the process of getting a no-code website up and running as easy as possible. We offer two main options:

• Free. That's right: we'll build and host the website for you. It will be on a subdomain of ours (e.g. you.simple.ink) — we chose this name because we liked the domain: shot, sweet and... well simple. So if you have the same opinion as we do, you might enjoy the subdomain
• Paid option. If you want to make use of our premium features, you'll need a paid plan. Our prices start at $4.5/mo, where you which include custom domains and more.

Absolutely you can, with Simple.ink!

We offer a free service that allows you to publish a site that you can add to, using Notion.

Ultimately, what you see in front of your eyes when opening a Notion page will be your website.

You can use either that, or, if you want to further customize, you can use a theme of ours for a custom design.

When you export a Notion page, Simple.ink will create a static version of the page — that means your page will load super fast for all of the the users out there. While Notion does not have a built-in feature to host your pages, there are online tools that you can use to do so: such as Simple.ink.

Nope!

Notion website hosting is included in all our plans.

Just to be clear: if you're asking whether you need any hosting plan from a website hosting company — the answer is no.

Once your website is built with Simple.ink, it's also hosted by us, so you won't have to worry about anything else.

Our Notion hosting comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth. Your content is automatically backed up too in Notion. If you need a custom domain, you can use our premium features, part of the paid plan(s) that we offer.

The best part? We also have a free plan. So... the conclusion is pretty clear: we offer free Notion website hosting and building!

What if I already have a website hosting plan?

We pretty much include hosting for free with the Notion website builder features, so that shouldn't be a problem.

If you already have a website (e.g. example.com) and you only want a Notion page (plus its subpages) to be hosted, we're working really hard to make that possible: coming soon! That said, you can host your Notion website as a subdomain (e.g. subdomain.me.com)

Practical example: you have myfirm.com, but you want your firm's podcast page built with Notion, due to its simplicity and speed of iteration. Two options are available:

• Option 1: Host the podcast page on podcast.myfirm.com and your Notion page's content is available there
• Option 2 (coming soon): We'll soon announce the possibility of adding your Notion page website (a sub-website now... right?) on myfirm.com/podcast

It's pretty simple:

1. Create a Notion page
2. Copy the URL of the page
3. Paste it in Simple.ink →  you're live

That's it. It does not get any easier than that. We believe no-code is about the simplicity and the speed of iteration.

So that's what we're doing with Simple.ink: making it seamless and as fast as possible for you to turn your Notion page into a website and then to go live.

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Ahh, Notion websites — beautiful, simple and almost impossible to mess it up

Whether you've added a custom domain to your Notion website or you're just having it hosted by Notion themselves, let's have a look at the question: Is Notion good for SEO?

The short answer is: Notion websites can be indexed by search engines (Google, etc) if you're on a paid plan, but they're limited. If you're paying, you might as well pay for a Notion website builder so that you can have 100% chances to rank on top positions in Google.

Let's have a look at the options.

SEO options for Notion

Option 1: Free Notion Plan. No indexing, limited

When you're starting out, Notion allows you to create beautiful pages which can feel or even made to look like websites.

The problem?

At one point, Notion added a function called "Search engine indexing":

Before that, Notion pages could index on some searches where the competition wasn't super high. That was showing its limits.

Now, by default, pages are rarely indexing for searches, as time went by from this specific feature.

Option 1 — not viable at all.

Option 2: Paid Notion plan. With indexing, but still limited

So we'll just pay for Notion to get this feature, and then we'll get to the #1 positions of search queries, right?

Not really and no, respectively.

Here's the thing: Notion charges $5/mo (or $48/year) for the Personal Pro plan. Even then, if you turn that tick on, you'll still be limited. It's better than nothing, however, and it's very convenient. But we've got options 3 and 4 below which are about the same level of convenience, and with more potential.

Anyway, coming back to this. So what's the catch?

• You'll be getting your credit card out
• You'll still be limited, but it's better than nothing
• On the flip side (the good part), this all happens in the Notion app, so if you don't want to leave it for whatever reason, this might be the best option

What are you losing though?

• No control over the meta title (the blue, bigger text in the Google preview above) or the meta description (the grey, smaller text that you see in searches below the title). That sucks
• No control over the preview image, when the page is shared on social
• The site will be slow, which highly impacts the positions. As of 2021, Google puts a lot of importance on this metric.
• No SEO continuity, as you're on a subdomain of Notion.

Option 3: Use a Notion Website Builder, which makes Notion good for SEO

Here is where we come in — although there are other Notion website builders, it costs nothing to try us out and it costs you to try our competitors (though we estimate we'll force them into offering a freemium plan), so no need to take out your credit card.

With Simple.ink, we transform your Notion pages into websites — as simple as that.

Pop in your link from the Notion page, spend about 30 seconds → your website is live.

That's how easy we've made it.

Now, we're offering paid plans if you want some pro features, but nothing stops you from going to optinon 4, which is...

Option 4 (if you're on a budget): Stick to a free Notion Website Builder

This is for you if you're either not sure whether you want to commit (nothing wrong with that), or you're on a budget.

If you're on a budget, the deal we're offering is simple and fair: we'll just grow with you, and until you start growing, the website is on us.

If you're unsure, you've got generous free plan to test out, see if Simple.ink has everything you need (and if it doesn't, let us know in the live chat what it is that you need — we'll probably build it for you!)

With our Notion static site generator, you won't be limited by any of the points we've listed earlier. The only caveat is the payment you'll have to make if you're looking for a paid feature (make sure you check our pricing page to see whether you need any of them).

Plus, as time goes by, we'll expand more and more beyond just the basic capabilities.

Why Notion pages are not optimized for SEO

By default, Notion pages are not exactly optimized for SEO:

• The page speed is far from perfect
• Meta descriptions and meta titles are poorly optimized
• You can't add any preview pictures
• You're ultimately on the Notion (sub)domain
• You'll need to be on a paid Notion plan to be able to activate search indexing

The more important question is: do you have everything aligned so that you can reach top #1 positions with your pages? The answer is: probably not.

The thing is this: if the competition for those searched words is also limited by something like Notion, you have chances. But if they are not limited (chances are, they're not limited), you'll have a handicap.

Especially if we're talking about a highly-searched word, where competition is fierce. The more value is there behind a searched query on search engines → the more competition there will be.

So what can you do?

We've researched the whole internet (not really, but almost) and the following seem to be the only options:

• Pay for Notion. At the time of writing this article, Notion charges $4/mo billed yearly or $5/mo billed monthly for the Personal Pro plan. That's the plan you'd need to get to enable search engine indexing, but even that is limited in itself.
• Build your website using something like Simple.ink → our pricing page is here, and we offer significantly more features besides just perfect SEO capabilities.
• If you're on a budget, we have a very generous free plan. Check out the link above → that plan in itself will give you perfect SEO capabilities for your website, which will be hosted on a beautiful subdomain of ours (e.g. yourname.simple.ink)

Is a Notion static site generator good for SEO?

Thankfully, these issues can be all solved with our Notion website maker function, which builds your Notion pages into a website with our Notion static site generator . We've built Simple.ink pretty much to address all the issues that stood between a Notion page and a live website. Why?

We think the Notion text editor is a great tool, but it just didn't have everything it needed to be able to create beautiful, stunning, fast-loading websites for people such as yourself!

So the bottom line is: on Notion websites built with Simple.ink, yes, SEO is doable. Moreover, there's nothing stopping you from reaching #1 positions at all — unlike a free Notion plan or even a paid one.

Besides, the speed of iteration you have over competitors in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) gives you an edge.

Curious to see everything that's editable? Sign up for a free account — it costs you nothing, and we won't hit you with a paywall at any point. Everybody gets a free Notion website, and we have an unlimited free plan!

Is Notion SEO friendly?

We can safely assume that Notion is SEO friendly. Though, the problem is that unless you don't go with the paid Personal Pro plan, you can't index your pages, so all of that SEO work is not going to be visible on the internet.

Though, with a free Simple.ink Notion website, your are going to avoid all of that, and once your website is done, your pages will rank on Google for free. Therefore, in this situation, Notion is indeed SEO friendly.

Can I use Notion as a website?

You absolutely can.

Notion website are not only beautiful and simple, but they can also be fast and perfectly optimized for your use case.

That in itself can give you an edge over competitors who have bloated websites, that try to do too many things at the same time and end up doing not too much at all.

If you want to build a quality website that will be a good marketing tool for your business or service, give Simple.ink a try. We provide affordable and easy to use websites to help get your business off the ground. Notion provides a full package of text edit tools (and more than that, really) that can help any website get built. Once your Notion page is ready, Simple.ink turns that into a website in about 30 seconds — sky is the limit.

It's a great choice for all sizes: a small business, say, or a personal website that you want to share your ideas with the world. Even startups or other bigger businesses use Simple.ink to create Notion websites!

Yes, you can! With Simple.ink you can use Notion to create a site that loads fast and looks great. You can add content (as much or as little as you'd like) and if you don't like the way something looks, your website is fully customizable in Notion so that you can make it look exactly the way you want it. You are in control!

We have made the process of building your website (using Notion) as easy as possible. All you need to do is get your Notion share URL to any page on our website, and we'll take care of the rest. You don't need to know how to code, and you don't have to pay a fortune for hosting plan.

Build your website with us

Simple.ink lets you build a website without any coding. All you need is a Notion page and we will convert it into a fully-functional, beautiful website that is hosted on our servers.

Get professional templates

To make the design process even easier, we have created an amazing library of professional templates that are ready for you to use without touching any code!

Blazing fast & free

No coding experience? No problem! Simple.ink is a blazingly fast website builder that doesn't require any technical knowledge or coding skills. We're also free for unlimited websites!

Built for the modern web

We're constantly adding new features to make sure Simple.ink is up to date with all the latest technologies - from AI to mobile devices to responsive layouts.

Fast, secure websites

We've got the basics covered, and then we're going a bit further. Simple.ink ensures that your website loads fast and is secure, perfect for startups and/or entrepreneurs who are looking for perfect SEO