Classic Google Sites deprecation pushed back to 2021 until feature parity reached

Back in 2016, Google revamped its G Suite service for making online sites and other internal resources aimed at teams. A plan to deprecate classic Google Sites was announced the year after, but Google is now pushing back that schedule to 2021 until feature parity is achieved on the new product.

In 2017, Google laid out a plan to deprecate Google Sites in light of the revamped version featuring G Suite integration, a new design, Google Analytics, and more. However, customers from large organizations complained over the lack of a “number of features in classic Sites that are particularly valuable.”

In light of this, the classic version of Sites will remain until the end of 2021 as Google works on adding new enterprise-focussed features that center around increased page customization, and support for larger internal sites that often serve as company intranets.

Create richer, more customized sites:

• New site themes so your sites can match your company look, feel, and brand.
• Improved text controls to provide you with a greater choice of fonts, colors, styles, and more.
• Standard templates from Google to help you quickly create common types of sites (such as team sites, project sites, and events sites).
• Custom templates to provide simple access to starter websites specific to your domain.
• Better integration with other G Suite products so you can easily embed content in Sites.
• New API capabilities, including AppScript support, so you can automate and manage sites.
• New page elements, like tables of contents and image carousels.

Create and manage larger sites:

• Additional functionality and controls to help you create and manage larger sites.
• Increased size limits so you can build larger sites.
• Ability to see what’s changed between the previous published version and current draft of a site, so you can make more informed publishing decisions.
• Version history so you can see and restore previous versions.
• Richer and more comprehensive search from within a site.
• Google Vault support for content from new Sites.

Until this is complete, “core classic Sites functionality” will remain accessible at sites.google.com/classic. However, Google warns that some functionality will begin to fail over time as the classic service first launched in 2008. As the new features are added, Google will work to improve migration tools and bring over existing users to the new Sites.

We continue to have dedicated engineers maintaining core functionality, but classic Sites was originally built many years ago and its infrastructure and integrations with other products and gadgets are quickly becoming outdated. As a result, we cannot guarantee all features will continue to work as they currently do.

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