Google Pages is shutting down in June: how to save your data

Do you have a website on Google Pages? Be wary guys, the service will be discontinued in June. But this won’t be like Yahoo! pulling the plug on it’s much-fabled Geocities. You have an option to move your site to a different Google service, for free, yet again.

So you’ll be able to transfer to Google Sites. To make the switch, you just have to wait till June and your account will be automatically migrated to Google Sites.

According to Google Sites, this is what you can do with their service:

• Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you don’t need anyone’s help to get started.
• Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments.
• Invite co-workers, classmates, or your entire organization to edit your site with you to keep it fresh and up-to-date. And let as many or few people view your site as you want.

But while Google Sites lets you put together quick and easy web pages, it’s more of a service for creating and sharing Wikis than a full fledged web page creation service. There quite a few things Google Sites can’t do.

Here are the things that Google Pages could do that Google Sites cannot:

• Support CSS
• Support JavaScript
• Web hosting

In other words, if you uploaded any images or other files to Google Pages, they won’t be transferred to Google Sites; they’ll automatically be deleted in June. And if you included any JavaScript on your page (which could include anything from advertisements to multimedia widgets), they won’t work anymore when your account is migrated to Google Pages.

If you’re not too excited about this development, you can export the files from Page Creator as a ZIP archive, and move to another webhosting service.