Moving Your Website from Google Pages to Google Sites

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Jaya Prabahar from TCS asks: "How can I easily migrate my web pages, images and other files from Google Page Creator to Google Sites?"

Google Pages was an awesome web hosting service where you could create a good looking website from scratch in minutes but unfortunately, Google is phasing out Page Creator in June to be replaced with Google Sites.

Automatic Migration to Google Sites

The migration from Google Pages to Google Sites will begin in May and all your pages from Page Creator will be automatically imported into Sites.

You won’t lose any existing web traffic because, after the move, all your existing pages on Page Creator will point to their new location on Google Sites so none of the old links will break and search visitors to a googlepages.com site will automatically land on the corresponding sites.google.com page.

How to Backup your Google Page Creator Files

However, unlike Google Page Creator, Google Sites is not a web hosting service so files like CSS, JavaScript, PDFs, web images, etc. that you may have uploaded on to your Google Pages site won’t be transferred to Google Sites. The same is true for any custom HTML web pages that you may have put on Google Pages.

Therefore it may be a good idea to download all your content from Google Pages locally or export it to another web hosting service before Google Pages is shut down permanently. Here’re the steps involved:

Step 1: Go to digitalinspiration.com and type the address of your existing Google Page website. Don’t forget to use a slash after the URL as in this example:

http://sarasvati96.googlepages.com/

Step 2: The tool will create a list of URLs of all files that are currently hosted on your Google Page Creator account. Copy this list to the clipboard and save it in a text file (say pages.txt).

Step 3: Download wget (if you don’t have that already) and execute the following command:

wget -i pages.txt

If you find wget a bit too geeky, install Flashget, press Ctrl+L and specify the location of the pages.txt file. Within minutes, all files from Google Pages will become available on your local drive.