Notion is a flexible app that can be used for many tasks, but it can also be used to create simple and effective websites
Turn your content on Notion into sleek, SEO-optimized webpages with Super. This article outlines seven steps for using Notion as an effective CMS (content management system) for website publishing. We will go beyond Notion’s built-in CMS features to craft a branded site that stands out in the sea of sites that look like versions of each other.
Is Notion a CMS?
Notion is a powerful content management system (CMS) that helps you store, organize, and retrieve content seamlessly. While it lets you publish content as a bundle of webpages, it offers limited customization options. You can’t style the page the way you want nor add preferred themes, colors, or fonts. But you need not worry about that if you use Super.
Super offers flexibility with design. You can choose how your visitors see and perceive your brand without compromising page load speed and SEO. Super fills the gap that Notion lacks as a basic CMS.
Here are 7 steps to using Notion as a CMS:
1. Pick a Superb template
Setting up a website on Notion is easy. But the experience your visitors get is not - Super.
Notion lets you create basic sites without coding. But a CMS should do more than that. It should help your website be on brand, look appealing, and yet load fast.
Super takes care of it all.
It boasts a repository of 40 Notion website templates, ready for you to pick and customize. You will find templates for all your needs - from creating a professional resume to a buzzing eCommerce store.
You can preview any template to see how different pages look and how well they render on your laptop and mobile screens. Select the one that aligns with your taste.
Next, duplicate the template to your own Notion workspace by following the instructions inside each template preview site.
Inside the template instructions will be a link to the Notion template, once you open it you can choose to duplicate a copy to your own Notion workspace.
Now we successfully duplicated the Ascent template to our own Notion workspace. Now you are all set to create your home page.
2. Create your Homepage on Notion
Your homepage is the most important page of your website. That’s the page search engines show when someone searches for your brand. It must not just look great, it should also display the information that a visitor might want to access.
Spend time deciding what your homepage must showcase to sell your brand better. Next, create a page in Notion and write the copy. Include images and other forms of visual media to make the page stand out.
Here are the steps to setting up your content on Notion and publishing it:
1. Open up the the newly duplicated template in your Notion dashboard
2. Now you can customize the content on the page by changing text and images. We will show you how to design the webpage through Super in the subsequent steps.
3. Once your page is ready, click on Share and turn the toggle on for Share to web. Then click Copy web link as we will need this later to create our Super site.
And guess what… Your homepage is ready! You will notice that it looks bland, but we will change that soon.
3. Connect your Notion page to Super
The skeletal structure of your page is ready. But you must connect it to Super to add layers of design that make your content presentable. The first step is signing up with Super and syncing it with Notion.
You can sign up and use Super for free forever, or you can access many more features with paid plans that start from $16/month ($12/month when paid annually).
Next, head over to the Super app and click on New Site at the top-right corner. Super will display a pop-up box as displayed in the below image.
Select one from the 3 payment options - Free site, Personal site, Pro site and type in your preferred site name. You can get a custom domain only with the paid plans, or you can preview your site for free by starting on the free plan.
Finally, paste the URL of the Notion share URL that you copied in the previous step and click on create.
Your Super website is ready. The below image shows what it looks like without a template. Still very basic, right? Let’s see how it looks with the template.
4. Setup your website template design on Super
So far, we have connected Notion and Super. In this step, we will load your Super website with your chosen template.. This will align your webpage design with that of your template.
Super templates come with a script that links the template to the app. You need to add it to the <head> section of the code. It’s a one-time simple activity, and here are the steps to that:
- On the template demo site, copy the script from the instructions page. The below image example shows the snippet for the Ascent template.
- Click on Code in your dashboard
- Paste the snippet under in the <head> tab.
- Notice the design and layout change instantly. What you see here will be how your live page renders.
The Super app is where you stage your website using an intuitive dashboard. You can access it on the left of the screen after logging in. We will keep referring to the dashboard for the rest of this article.
5. Customize the design of your website
This step is where the magic happens! We will transform your basic Notion content into a highly engaging page. Ready to experience the true power of a CMS? Let’s dive in.
Super offers many avenues to customize your website. You can find them in the dashboard.
Set color theme and font
Click on the Design option in the dashboard to access the dropdowns for color themes and fonts. Super offers 4 themes and 65 font styles to choose from. Play around with different options to see what works best for you.
Setup Navbar and Footer
Once you have more pages on your domain, you can add them to your primary menu and footer.
To create a custom navbar, click on Navbar in your dashboard. This section enables you to:
- Play around with different styles
- Add items to the Navbar
- Customize background and text color
- Make the Navbar standout with a shadow
- Add a Call-to-Action (CTA) Notion button that stands out from the Navbar and gets clicks
Create more pages
You need to add pages to be featured in the navbar and footer sections of your website. Super will automatically find any subpages of your homepage in Notion, and add them to your site. You can find these in the Pages section.
You can also manually add pages to the site, remembering that these still need to be subpages in Notion of the homepage that you have connected to Super. To do that, click on Pages in your dashboard and click on Add new page. If you duplicated a template then it may already have some pages inside, you can delete or edit these in Notion too.
You will see a pop-up that captures the details of the new page. Pretty URL forms the last segment of the live URL. The pretty URL for this page, for example, is 5-reasons-to-choose-notion-as-your-next-cms. The second textbox captures the URL of the live Notion page that you want to show on your website.
You can password-protect pages and also add any code that you want to implement on the preferred page alone.
6. Optimize for Search
If your goal is to generate high-quality traffic for your business, you must reach people actively searching for the service you offer. The best way to do that is by ranking at the top of Google search. Notion is a good basic content management system (CMS), but it doesn’t let you optimize your content for SEO.
It’s easy to do that with Super.
Click on the globe icon next to the page that you want to optimize. It opens a widget that captures the metadata for the page.
You can set the title you want the search engines to show while displaying your page. You can also add a description that summarizes your page.
7. Explore other features
Super offers a host of other features that will change the look and feel of your website. Click on Options in the dashboard to:
- Change your website’s language.
- Setup Favicon - the tiny image that shows up in the browser tab
- Enable or disable search engine indexing
- Enable or disable the site search feature
Super helps you unlock the true potential of Notion as a CMS. With Super, you are not limited to managing content behind the scenes - You can get it the attention it deserves in style. Super offers all the tools you need to showcase your brand with confidence.
When you pair Super with Notion, you unlock extended SEO, performance upgrades, and useful customization features like custom domains, themes, pretty URLs, password-protection, and more.
5 reasons to choose Notion as your next CMS
1. Zero friction
In comparison to other content management systems like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, or Ghost, Notion is a breath of fresh air. Its simplicity is incomparable to most other tools and editing your website content often feels like taking notes, or dragging & dropping elements around a canvas, rather than editing a live website.
If you prioritize ease of publishing over more advanced customization features, Notion is likely the right CMS for your next website.
2. Super-powered content
One of the the more powerful features of Notion are databases. In the context of managing content for websites, it's pure magic. Imagine a single content database that powers your entire website, and different pages can sort or filter through different views of that database to display the right content on the right pages. They're powerful enough to create a scalable content system, and simple enough to use with practically no learning curve.
If you're creating a blog with Notion for example, you can create a global content database with all your posts, and use different database properties for things like categories, published/unpublished states, post authors, and more.
3. Creative constraints
When used correctly, constraints are a huge creativity-multiplier. In many cases, the less options you have to choose from, the more you'll do with what you have. Not only does Notion have most components needed for modern websites, but they're all neatly organized in a component panel and ready for you to start utilizing just by hitting / on your keyboard.
From basic typographic elements like text, headings, and lists, to common media elements like images and video, to more advanced components like galleries and embeds, Notion has all the building blocks needed to create your next full-featured website, not to mention their default block styles, typography, and color scheme all look great right out of the box.
4. Centralized content
Software now days is extremely fragmented. When a tool like Notion comes along and allows you to simply and effectively replace three or more tools, it's a game changer.
With most other content management systems, content is usually disconnected from publishing, meaning the tool you use to research, plan, and write out your content is different from the tool you use to publish it. With Notion, they're one in the same. Your website lives alongside everything else you already do within Notion.
5. Powerful automations
The Notion API is an easy way to connect your favorite 3rd-party tools to your Notion pages & databases. You can even use powerful no-code platforms like Zapier to connect to these tools without a single line of code.
- Populate a Notion database from tools like Google Sheets, Airtable, and more.
- Send form submissions from apps like Typeform or Tally to Notion
- Receive Slack notifications for new Notion database items
- Track your email subscribers within Notion
6. And plenty more
We could probably go on forever about more reasons to use Notion as a powerful CMS, but here are a few more points to help seal the deal.
- Don't have your laptop? Edit content from anywhere with Notion's mobile apps.
- Looking to collaborate on your website? Just invite them to your Notion page.
- Want to reorder content? Simply drag & drop some blocks around.
- Need to add an image to your site? Drag or paste it in.
- Noticed a typo? Quickly rewrite it, and it's live.
- It's completely free for personal use.
When you pair Super with Notion, you unlock extended SEO, performance upgrades, and useful customization features like custom domains, themes, pretty URLs, password-protection, and more.
Shortcomings of Notion as a CMS
1. Connecting a custom domain is expensive
Your domain name is the identity of your website, it’s what people recognize your brand with. They use it to find you and access your services through Google - Having relevant keywords in the domain name can also provide SEO benefits.
However, Notion charges a bomb to allow users to connect a custom domain to their websites and offers not additional features or benefits. Furthermore, it automatically assigns AI-generated domain names to each site created within the platform. This can lead to lengthy and random URLs that may not align with your brand or be SEO-optimized.
While you can change the domain name from the settings, the “notion.site” domain extension stays unless you pay $12 per month with Notion’s Plus plan. This means, Notion owns the website and the traffic it gets, not you.
Lack of ownership can prevent you from building a brand and setting up trackers for analyzing data.
2. Limited design capabilities
While Notion excels in content organization, it falls short in design customization. You are limited with color options and can access a limited selection of fonts, making it hard to design your website to brand.
Moreover, Notion lacks templates tailored to specific page types. This means you need to start from scratch for each page category.
Further, Notion does not cater for right-to-left text alignment, which means you won’t be able to create websites in a few languages.
3. Inability to optimize for SEO
Notion owns all the content you create - even the public pages, which means you can’t customize the meta details of the page, unless you subscribe to the paid plan that costs $12 per month. Even though your content can not be optimized for search, it doesn’t matter because Notion pages are not indexed for free accounts — they won’t appear on Google, even if they were well optimized.
4. Limited analytics features
Notion has an analytics feature but it is limited to data generated by internal users. You can see how many of your teamspace members viewed the page and when. But that information is not enough if you intend to generate leads from your website.
In that case, you would need a more powerful analytics solution. While you can integrate your Notion website with Google Analytics, you will find using GA4 difficult as it is a complex tool. A better alternative could be — Super Analytics.
That’s correct! Super has an inbuilt analytics feature. You get to access a powerful dashboard with key insights that can help you make informed decisions.
5. Allows setting up only basic navigation bars at high monthly costs
Navigation bars are like a mini-guide to your website. They help users find relevant content fast, thus reducing the bounce rate. While you can create a Notion navbar with a button in Super, even with a free plan, Notion supports creating a basic navbar that too with paid plans.
6. Inability to add clickable buttons
By adding buttons in Notion pages, you can gently guide visitors to the page that you want them to visit.
For example, if you have a Notion portfolio, you would want the visitors to land on your “contact” page and discover channels to reach you. By adding a Call-to-action (CTA) button in your portfolio with the anchor text - “Contact me”, you can gently guide them to the “Contact” page.
While the Notion template button is a highly useful feature, it’s different from a CTA button — a feature that Notion does not support.
Best practices of using Notion as a CMS
1. Organize content effectively
While using Super, combined with the headless Notion CMS, you will notice that the content organization in Super is exactly the same as in Notion. By setting a proper folder-subfolder structure within Notion, you can ensure that your website will follow the same sitemap.
Here’s how you can create folders in Notion and insert subpages under them.
2. Adopt an aesthetic design
Notion supports creation of aesthetic pages, you can choose from a few color styles, arrange your content into columns, add a variety of blocks, etc. The same page layout appears in Super as well.
By making content look neat in the Notion CMS, you make it look neat in Super.
3. Templatize pages
By creating a Notion template for every page type, you speed up your process of content production. For example, creating a blog template will save you hours while blogging on Notion. The more you templatize your approach, the better you will use Notion and Super as a CMS.
4. SEO optimization
As established in the previous section, Notion offers limited SEO features. By using Super, however, you customize your meta title and description, add schema to your content, and make your content mobile friendly.
And since Super takes care of all the code-work, you can design your pages the way you want, without worrying about the page load speed.
5. Set up analytics
By setting up Super’s analytics in your CMS account, you can track the visitor behavior seamlessly. You can analyze key metrics such as bounce rate, unique visitor count, average session duration, demographics, and much more — without relying on the complex GA4 instance!
