Notion Sites Review: Is It Any Good for Blogging?

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The simplest answer to this question is yes, it is possible to create blogs with Notion Sites. But is the simplest answer also the most accurate? Not always.

Even though you can write basic blogs with Notion Sites, it needs more functionalities to be a professional blog writing tool. To understand why that is, we need to dive deep into what Notion Sites is capable of when it comes to blogging.

This article is a Notion Sites review with a special focus on its blog writing and publishing capabilities. Let’s dive in:

What is Notion Sites

“Notion Sites'' is the latest addition to the hyper-adaptable Notion CMS. It allows users to publish their Notion Pages as web pages without worrying about backend complexities.

Simply put, Notion Sites is a simple, robust, and functional website builder. With little effort, anyone can turn their specific Notion Page into a portfolio website, a blog, a landing page, or more.

Here’s an overview of the features, pricing, and gaps in Notion Sites:

Basic Google Analytics Support: Helps you easily keep track of visitors and website performance at a basic level. This information is useful for the website and content optimization.

Limited Design Functionality: Features simplistic design options in black and white. While it does reduce clutter, it may feel restrictive for blog websites that demand a richer design profile.

Custom Domain: Features domains (domain.notion.site) that are customizable and freely available. For third-party or business domains, you’ll have to purchase the “Plus” plan.

Target Customers: The simplistic setup and publishing features are designed for prosumers, early-stage startups, freelancers, link aggregators, landing pages, or similar use cases.

Pricing Plans: The free plan offers users a customizable notion domain. For more advanced options like third-party domains, you need to purchase the Plus plan. It comes at a cost of $8 per domain billed annually or $10 per domain billed monthly.

Creating a blog post using Notion Sites

Notion Sites is remarkable because it converts your Notion Page into a live web page with a few clicks. All you have to do is write your desired blog with images, headings, internal links, and other elements.

You can add these elements directly from Notion seamlessly. Once the blog is complete, click the “share” in the top right corner, and then “publish.”

Adding Elements to a Notion Blog Post

To add elements like images, embed social posts, or callouts to a Notion blog, hover over a new line and click the + button on the left.

Adding Videos, Images, and Visuals

To add images, videos, or other visual elements, click the + sign, scroll down to the “Media” section, and select the element you wish to add.

To embed social posts, paste the link of the post and hover over the link to select “Create embed” from the drop down menu.

Adding Callouts

To add callouts, click the + sign and click on the “Callout” option.

Publishing a Blog Post with Notion Sites

The process of publishing a blog post using Notion Sites is quite straightforward. Here are the steps outlining the process:

Start by writing your desired blog on a Notion Page.

Click the “share” button in the top right corner.

Click on the “publish” button right next to the “share” button in the drop-down menu.

The new drop-down will show you the domain and options like site customization, search engine indexing, and link expiration settings.

Change the Domain Name or Use Third-Party Domains

Click on the share button in the top right corner and then click on publish.

To change or modify the domain, click on the downward arrow next to the domain.

In the free version, you only get access to notion domains ending in “.notion.site”.

These domains are customizable but subject to being claimed by other users.

To use third-party business domains, you’ll have to purchase the “Plus” plan.

Site Customization and Other Permissions

Similarly, from the publish section, you can click on the “site customization” setting.

Doing so will take you to a page where you can edit settings like themes, favicon, header, and Google Analytics.

In the free version, your blog will show a Notion favicon, and you can not upload custom favicons.

Similarly, it will say “built with Notion” in the header when using the free version.

Click on the “Header” button to toggle permissions like breadcrumbs, search button, duplicate, and Notion watermark.

To turn on Google Analytics, click on the button on the right and add your measurement ID. This feature is also available in the Plus version.

Notion Sites and SEO

Notion Sites offers some basic functionalities when it comes to search engine optimization. Here’s what they are:

Indexing, Meta Titles, and Meta Descriptions

By clicking on “Search engine indexing” from the publishing drop-down menu, you can make your Notion blogs discoverable to Google crawlers.

When you turn on the option, you can also add an SEO-optimized title and meta description. Enriching these sections with relevant keywords will undoubtedly help you rank better.

Additionally, you can connect Google Analytics to your blog to collect key metrics.

Breadcrumbs

Another SEO functionality Notion Sites offers is the “breadcrumbs.” You can toggle it on in the “header” settings in the “site customization settings.”

Doing so will not only help you categorize your blog pages, but will also make it easier for the users to navigate them.

You can also use breadcrumbs to insert relevant keywords in the link path to help the blog rank better.

Is That Enough?

These primary SEO functionalities may not be enough for a full-fledged blog that aims to bring a large number of visitors. Here are some features Notion Sites lacks:

Limited Design Features: Yes, limited design features can affect SEO capabilities. Some blogs may need unique design elements to improve search rankings - something that Notion Sites lacks.

Limited Tracking Options: You can only integrate Google Analytics with Notion Sites. While it does help, it is not enough for a blog with a lot of pages.

No Schema Support: Notion Sites does not support schema markup. Schema markup is crucial in providing Google more context about a web page’s content, which ultimately improves its ranking.

Limited Mobile-SEO Capabilities: Notion Sites does not offer any settings to optimize a web page for mobile devices.

Pros and Cons of Notion Sites

Notion Sites review will be incomplete without a discussion about its pros and cons. We are focused on its capabilities as a blog CMS and publisher, so this section will speak to that.

You have to consider a few key issues with how Notion Sites work right now and its impact on your blogging performance:

Limited Customization Options

Notion Sites offers insufficient design options. For example, it features a black-and-white theme for minimalism. It may not be a good thing for a professional blog that requires a lot of customization.

Limited Multi-Page Support

Notion Sites is ideal for single-page websites like landing pages, sales pages, and portfolios. Even though it does offer multi-page functionality, it is incomparable to a comprehensive CMS designed for blogging.

Clunky Content Management

Notion features a simplistic interface that focuses on productivity rather than expansiveness. For a large blogging website with a lot of pages - content management becomes a taxing endeavor in Notion Sites.

Unlike a traditional CMS, Notion Sites is not built with the idea of handling the data of a lot of visitors. Consequently, it has limited GDPR compliance features.

Users interested in creating a full-fledged blog with Notion Sites must be extra cautious about this factor.

Limited SEO Capabilities

A blog site with lots of pages needs that many features when it comes to SEO. Unfortunately, that is not possible with Notion Sites.

While it offers basic capabilities like indexing and Google Analytics, it lacks sophisticated features like cross-device optimization, schema support, detailed metrics tracking, and more.

It doesn’t mean Notion Sites isn’t any good for bloggers. Here are a few strengths of this solution that some bloggers may find useful:

Easy to Use

The most distinctive feature of Notion Sites is how easy it is to create and publish a blog. If you don’t want to delve deep into the technical side of blogging, Notion Sites is ideal for you.

Simple SEO Capabilities

Notion Sites offers basic SEO functionalities that are enough to get a small blog seen on Google. It includes features like indexing, Google Analytics, meta titles, and meta descriptions that may help a basic blog rank better.

They’re definitely not enough if you’re serious about using SEO to attract more traffic for your blog, though. For this, you need a full integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Multimedia Support

Notion Sites offers a plethora of options when it comes to attaching or embedding:

Videos

Images

Social media posts

Audio files

Quotes

Other Notion Pages

and more

These elements can help you greatly improve the blog readability and engagement.

Pre-made Templates

If you’re clueless about where to start, you can choose from a number of Notion blog templates to quickly set up and move to publishing.

Free Plan

Notion Sites offers you a free basic plan that comes with a customizable Notion domain. The downside to this is you’re stuck with the Notion favicon and “built with Notion” tag in the header of your blog.

Minimalistic Design

Notion’s inclination towards minimalism makes it a great tool for new users who feel overwhelmed with a lot of design elements. However, this can be counterproductive for larger blogs.

Key takeaways

By now, it must be clear that Notion Sites can be a useful tool when it comes to blog writing. But there is more nuance to it than simply being a yes-or-no discussion.

While it does offer some clear advantages, it also comes with cons that make it unsuitable for a comprehensive blog website. On the one hand, you have simplicity and ease of use, but on the other hand, you have restrictive design and SEO features.

So, what is a powerful and feature-rich Notion alternative that lets you publish a blog from Notion? The answer is Feather.

Feather.so - What is it, and Why is it Better?

Feather is a web publishing platform that allows you to publish blogs while using Notion as a CMS. Once you link it to your Notion, you can publish your blogs as soon as you’re done writing it.

But Notion Sites offers that too, so what makes Feather a better Notion alternative?

Better Customization Features

Feather is rich in website customization features that are incredibly useful when you are running a large blog.

These features help you design a website that not only matches your brand’s style but also offers a highly engaging user experience.

Improved SEO, Analytics, and Tracking

Since Feather aims to be a dedicated blog publishing platform, it doesn’t hold back on SEO, tracking, and analytics functionalities.

You can integrate it with various SEO tools to help you consistently optimize your blog for more traffic.

Robust Content Management

Notion Sites fails when you’re dealing with a large number of content pages.

Conversely, Feather offers intuitive features that allow you to easily organize and manage blog posts, categories, and tags.

Specific Tool for a Specific Purpose

Notion Sites tries to satisfy multiple use cases like prosumers, early-stage startups, single-page landing pages, portfolio websites, and link aggregators.

On the other hand, Feather is designed purposefully with blogs in mind. Every single feature of Feather aims to serve a single goal, and that is to help your blog be better.

Wrapping Up

While Notion Sites is a simple and quick tool for single-page websites or smaller blogs, it is not recommended for creating a purpose-driven blog for your business.

Notion has its strength as a note-taking and CMS tool, but it still has a long way to go as a specialized blogging CMS.

For such use cases, it is better to stick to purpose-built products that not only offer you powerful features but also understand your unique blogging challenges.