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

Before you begin: To turn a service on or off for certain users, put their accounts in an organizational unit (to control access by department) or add them to an access group (to allow access for users across or within departments).

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

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

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceSites.
3. Click Service status.

4. To turn a service on or off 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. To change the Service status, select On or Off.
   3. Choose one:
      • If the Service status is set to Inherited and you want to keep the updated setting, even if the parent setting changes, click Override.
      • If the Service status is set to Overridden, either click Inherit to revert to the same setting as its parent, or click Save to keep the new setting, even if the parent setting changes.
        Note: Learn more about organizational structure.
6. (Optional) To turn on a service for a set of users across or within organizational units, select an access group. For details, go to Use groups to customize service access.

Changes can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly. Learn more

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.

Next steps

• For new Sites, you can enable new site creation and editing. Learn more
• For classic Sites, you can enable viewers to comment on sites. Learn more

Related topics

• Turn a service on or off for Google Workspace users
• Manage access to services that aren't controlled individually
• Turn on or off new services by default
• Google Workspace for Education Core and Additional services
• Google Vault supported services and data types