In March 2024, Google sent a quiet email to millions of small business owners.

Their free website, the one they’d set up through Google Business Profile a few years back and forgotten was even running, was going away.

They had three months.

Then it would just be gone.

Many of them didn’t see the email in time. Some found out the hard way: a customer called to say the site was broken. Others didn’t find out at all.

Millions of small business websites were suddenly on borrowed time, many belonging to exactly the kind of businesses you’d expect: local plumbers, landscapers, electricians, and other service providers who built something once and trusted Google to keep the lights on.

They weren’t wrong to trust them.

Until they were.

You’re a Tenant, Not an Owner

When you build your website on someone else’s platform, you don’t actually own it in any meaningful sense.

Your content lives on their servers, locked inside their system.

If they raise prices, change the product, or shut the whole thing down, you have no say.

You work around it or you start over.

That’s not a worst-case scenario. It’s a pattern that has played out over and over again.

This Isn’t a Fluke

The Google Business Profile situation is recent, but it’s far from unique.

Here’s what the last decade of DIY website builders looks like:

Adobe Muse

Adobe announced it was stopping development of Muse in 2018, with technical support ending in 2020.

They gave users two years of warning.

Two years.

And yet, even now, BuiltWith still shows well over 100,000 active Adobe Muse sites, including tens of thousands in the United States, still running on a dead platform.

Migration sounds simple until you’re actually facing it.

Many businesses just… didn’t.

Classic Google Sites

In 2021, Google began retiring Classic Google Sites and pushed users toward New Google Sites, a different product with a different structure.

For many site owners, that meant a forced migration on a deadline.

It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was another reminder that when your website depends on someone else’s product roadmap, you are not the one in control.

Flash-Based Builders

When major browsers dropped support for Adobe Flash in 2020, any site that relied on Flash-based elements simply broke.

For some builders, entire sites stopped working overnight.

There was no migration path.

Flash was gone, and so were the sites built on it.

The pattern is the same every time: a platform makes a business decision, and business owners who built on that platform are left to deal with the consequences.

What Platform Independence Actually Means

There’s a nuance worth naming here.

Squarespace and Wix technically output HTML and CSS, which are standard web code.

So the issue isn’t really about “web standards” in a technical sense.

The issue is ownership and portability.

When your site is built inside a proprietary platform, your content is trapped in their system.

Moving it means rebuilding it.

When your site is built on open, non-proprietary code, meaning code you or your developer actually owns, you can take it anywhere.

If your hosting provider shuts down, you move it.

If you want to switch agencies, you take your site with you.

No one is holding the keys.

MintySites builds on Astro, a modern framework that outputs clean, fast HTML.

The code is yours.

The content is yours.

If you ever need to move, you move.

You do not start over.

A Note on “Free” Platforms

Free is never actually free.

Free website tools from large tech companies like Google, Meta, and others exist because those platforms have their own reasons to want you there.

When those reasons change, the product changes.

Or disappears.

Paying for a platform isn’t a guarantee either.

But there’s a meaningful difference between paying for a service built on durable, portable technology versus paying for a locked-in subscription where the company owns your site more than you do.

If You’re Not Sure What You Have

A lot of small business owners genuinely don’t know what their site is built on, who controls the hosting, or what would happen if their platform changed its pricing or shut down tomorrow.

If you built it yourself on a popular builder a few years ago and have not thought much about it since, it might be worth finding out.

Not because disaster is imminent, but because the Google Business Profile situation wasn’t a surprise to people who were paying attention.

It was a surprise to people who assumed the platform would always be there.

If you’d like a straight answer about what your current setup means for your business and whether it leaves you exposed, MintySites can help you figure out what you actually own, what you can move, and what would happen if your current platform changed the rules.