There are a million ways to create and launch a website.
But if you’re already a Notion pro, why not use a tool you’re familiar with instead of learning something else?
Notion is a valuable skill to learn.
Huge companies like Figma, Pixar, and the one I work for, Loom, use Notion across their entire business.
I’ve created probably 100 Notion documents since starting a year ago.
We use Notion for everything, but there are some places Notion falls short.
You can publish a Notion page to the web, but it has serious draw backs.
Read on to learn why and what a better option is. And don’t miss my list of free notion templates.
Here’s a sneak peak though.
Potion is an easy to use website builder on top of Notion. Turn an existing Notion page into a fast website with a custom URL in seconds.
How To Publish A Notion Page
In the top right of your Notion page, click Share, then click publish to web.
There are additional options you can check as well, like:
- Link expiration date (new feature!)
- Allow Comments
- Allow Editing
- Allow duplicating
- Allow search engine indexing
They look like this
But there are some key problems with doing this.
Problems with publishing Notion pages
The four main problems with publishing Notion pages the default way are:
- They’re really slow, and page speed matters for users with poor internet connections
- The URLs are ugly
- The pages aren’t SEO friendly
- You can’t use a custom domain
Here’s why each of those matters.
Poor page speed
Page speed is correlated with website conversion websites.
The above image is from Cloudflare. They run one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) in the world.
Faster pages convert better than slower pages. And the reason is simple.
Users hate waiting for a page to load. There’s an expectation that pages will load fast, and if they don’t then users will leave.
The other reason is that not every person has a super fast internet connection.
Users with slow connections should be able to use the internet in a reasonably efficient way. They deserve a good experience too.
Default Notion pages are pretty slow because they can have a lot of heavy elements on them, like:
- Images with large file sizes
- Videos and other embedded files
Tools like Potion solve this.
Ugly URLs
Notion URLs are ugly.
They have all this extra junk on the end, like this
https://nicklafferty.notion.site/X-Y-Z-0845ac8d228645bab5c1fc5a15f5f8ca
Luckily you can fix this with a Notion website builder too, like Potion .
Not SEO friendly
Published Notion pages aren’t SEO friendly.
Headings, which should be coded as , , , etc, aren’t coded like that.
That’s important because Google uses those common HTML tags to better understand the content of a page.
This is a screenshot of a default Notion page that’s been shared to the web. It looks at the types of headings on the page and counts the number.
That page has an H1 and an H2 visible in the screenshot, but Notion doesn’t code them correctly.
No custom domains
This is probably my biggest gripe with Notion’s default sharing feature.
You can only use the subdomain you select in your settings and not a custom domain.
Notion URLs are already really long, and if I was running a business or just wanted to look more professional by using a custom domain instead, I can’t.
Luckily, Potion fixes all of these issues.
Potion - A Notion Website Builder
Potion is a website builder that solves all of Notion’s problems with publishing pages.
It supports:
- Custom domains
- Editing SEO fields like title and meta description
- Faster page speed
- Better font support
- Cleaner URLs
And it’s easy to use. Here’s exactly how to get started.
Sign up for Potion
Head to the Potion website to sign up. Each account comes with a free 7 day trial.
Then click Add New Site
Add a name, paste the public URL of your Notion page, and select a subdomain to use. This is what I chose.
From there you get dropped into a website builder that updates automatically when your Notion page changes.
Configuring Potion
Start by adding the title and description of your home page.
Google uses these values to understand what your website is about and they display in search results.
You can also change:
- font type to many more options than Notion has by default
- font size
- background color
- font color
- and the content width, in pixels
Every sub-page your add will be available to Potion. You can add them to the main navigation and create dropdowns.
Optimizing for speed
If you want the fastest website possible I’d avoid using a cover image.
In my testing it significantly slowed down page speed because the image at the top is very large, both in dimensions and in file size.
Here’s the page speed score with a cover image.
65/100 on mobile isn’t bad but it’s not great either.
Here is the speed without the cover image.
93/100 is much better.
Add your content
Once Potion is connected you can start building your website in Notion, the same way you’d build any other page.
And if you need help there are a ton of guides on the Potion website
I prefer this over other types of Website builders because I know Notion really well.
I don’t need to learn another CMS or tool which helps cut down on time required to ship a new website.
Wrapping Up
Creating a website with Notion is honestly really easy, as long as you have the right tool.
You can solve all of major problems with Notion’s default web sharing option by using a tool called Potion.
Notion + Potion = the best combo for building Notion websites.
Give it a try today.
