Notion Sites — and the Super.so, Potion.so and Helpkit wrappers that built around the Notion content model — solved a specific problem cleanly: how to publish a Notion page or database as a website without rebuilding the content in a separate CMS. For documentation, internal wikis published externally, and solo-founder landing pages, the approach works. For real commercial websites — services businesses, e-commerce, local-pack-led trades, anything that needs to rank on a competitive query — the ceiling is sharp.
What Notion Sites is good at
Three things the Notion-as-website approach does materially better than the alternatives. The editing model is genuinely Notion — for teams already working in Notion, publishing is the same edit-in-Notion workflow without context-switching. The setup is fast — point a domain at the Notion page (or a Super.so wrapper) and the site is live in minutes. Documentation and knowledge-base content fits the model naturally — Notion was built for this kind of structured-but-flexible content, and the rendered output reads cleanly.
What Notion Sites is not good at
Four things the Notion-as-website approach does worse than a proper build. Performance — Notion-rendered pages typically score 50-70 on PageSpeed mobile because the rendering layer ships substantial JavaScript before paint. Schema depth — Notion does not emit Service, Product, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Article with the proper author and publisher, or any of the deeper entities that move ranking on commercial queries. Visual brand — every Notion-rendered site looks like a Notion page, with the same typography, the same spacing, the same layout primitives; brand differentiation is structurally limited. Customisation — beyond the basics (colour, font, header image), the customisation surface is narrow.
When Notion Sites is genuinely the right answer
Three scenarios. First: you publish documentation, a knowledge base, internal-team wiki content, or a help centre where the doc-style rendering is appropriate and the content benefits from the Notion editing model. Second: you are a solo founder or indie hacker with a single-page landing site that genuinely changes weekly, you live in Notion already, and the workflow is real rather than novelty. Third: SEO and performance are genuinely not material to your traffic economics — the site is a credibility layer rather than a conversion path. In each case Notion Sites is genuinely better than the over-engineered alternative.
When the migration is overdue
Three patterns that point to migration. The site is a commercial conversion path — services business, agency, e-commerce, trades — and the SEO ceiling is capping the business. Paid media spend is hitting Core Web Vitals penalties on Quality Score because the Notion-rendered baseline is too slow. The brand has grown into needing a real visual identity that the Notion rendering cannot support. The integrations needed (Stripe Checkout, multi-step lead forms with conditional logic, CRM webhooks, real analytics depth) push past what Notion can support.
The hybrid pattern that often wins
Many teams that come to us from Notion Sites do not want to abandon Notion — they want to keep Notion as the editorial source-of-truth where their content actually gets written, and publish to a properly-built website via the Notion API. The pattern we ship: content lives in Notion, structured into pages and databases the team already maintains. A scheduled build (or on-demand revalidation) pulls the content via the Notion API at the moment of edit and renders it into a static site with full schema, proper Core Web Vitals and brand-controlled visual presentation. The team workflow stays in Notion; the public-facing site is no longer constrained by Notion’s rendering layer.
The cost comparison
Super.so individual: $16/month = ~£190/year. Plus Notion Plus at $10/user/month for the source workspace if not already on it. All-in: roughly £250-£400/year. Five-year total: £1,250-£2,000. Same-day Launch tier: £499 + £180/year hosting × 4 = £1,219 across five years. Cost is genuinely comparable — within £200-£800 across five years — and the differences in performance, SEO depth and brand control are the actual decision drivers.
The migration sequence
Content extracts cleanly from Notion via the official Notion API — every page, every database, every block. The new build re-implements the visual layer (typically a meaningful improvement on the Notion default), adds the schema depth Notion did not emit, and either replaces Notion as the source-of-truth (clean break) or keeps Notion as the editorial source with the public site pulling via API (hybrid pattern). Most Notion migrations complete same-day for the website layer. For teams keeping Notion as the source, the API integration adds another half-day of setup work and a scheduled-build pipeline.