I Moved My Website to Notion
Here's why and how you can do the same
Over the years I have used tons of different tools and technologies to build my websites. Like most, I stuck with Squarespace the longest. It was simple and fairly affordable. About a year ago I moved my website to Webflow and loved it, but like most things in life, it was just adding too much complexity and unneeded cost. So a few months ago I decided to move my website to Notion and I have loved every second of it.
I have mentioned Notion in this letter dozens of times. It is a tool that I just cannot live without these days. I manage basically everything in it, with only a few exceptions.
So why did I take so long to move over to it for my website?
I wanted something really custom that showed my style and talent. I also wanted a challenge. As someone that loves to learn, I challenged myself to learn Webflow. I taught myself a decent amount within one weekend and stood up a full website within two weeks. Challenge passed.
But why did I stick with Webflow for so long?
Guilt. Oh, and analytics. Learning Webflow was an achievement, one that I wanted to show off. How could I say that I can build in Webflow but have nothing to show for it? Never mind all the time it took. Also, Webflow, like most website builders, allows for analytics. This meant I could track traffic to my site and fuss over how much or little there was.
What was the tipping point?
Like most minimalists, I assess the things I have pretty often. I do this with physical and digital goods. In this case, specifically, I was assessing cost while doing my bi-weekly budgeting. Webflow cost me $44 USD monthly. This is not a lot by any means, but for a personal/ business website it was on the higher side. The guilt still ran strong and I almost didn't make the decision to cancel but luckily my wife pushed me. I gave myself one billing period to migrate over.
What was the migration/ building like?
Simple, great, frictionless. These are all true, but mainly because I have tried to use Notion in the past as a website, so I had experience and I built most of the site already. I took about a day to build some key pages that were missing, pointed my websites' main URL to it, and done. In short, that is all it really was, but as an avid Notion builder and consultant, I spent lots of time buttoning things up. Just to note, I did have to part ways with analytics but I am morally not a fan of analytics anyway, never mind I don’t get all that much traffic to warrant it anyway.
How is it built and how does it work?
I am not using any Notion wrapper tools such as Super.so. Super is a great product, but I decided that I want to lower friction and cost. So, a no-frills, all Notion website was it.
I use Google Domains, so I just have my website forwarding to the root Notion page for the website.
I also have a few additional subdomains set up for evergreen URLs. These are useful if I ever decide to move back to Webflow or use something else.
It is key to keep the website as a top-level workspace within your Notion account. This way permissions to each page are less important and you can just make that page public.
Once that is configured and the domain is forwarding as expected, anything you add to that page or sub-pages will be your website!
Note: the free Notion plan works fine for this but you cannot turn on "search engine indexing" with the free version.
You can build it any way you choose, just keep in mind page hierarchy and accessibility.
To help you with building your own Notion website, I have created a Notion template to get started and a Figma file to add your own customization.
I would love for you to try it out. If you don’t want to migrate your website to it I totally understand, Notion is not for everyone, but I’d love for you to try it and let me know what you think.
How do you feel about using Notion as a website? Do you think it is too limiting? Does the idea of having a very low-cost site intrigue you enough to finally build yourself one? Let me know by replying to this email or commenting below.