5 Reasons You Should Never Make a Website for Free

Yes, you can make a website for free. But should you? Sure, a free website will work, it will look OK, and people might even visit it. But there are significant compromises you'll have to accept, and you could end up regretting going with a free website.

To be frank, there are several downsides to using a free website and, when it only costs a few dollars a month to make a brilliant site with none of these issues, there’s no reason to weigh yourself down with the limitations of a free site.

If you're just here because you want to try out a website builder (with a free trial or possibly a free plan), we won't waste your time – you can take our 1-minute web builder quiz to find the best option for you and start building immediately with a free trial.

But if you're after more information, we'll explain why you should always pay to create a great website (you won't have to pay much!), and set out the downsides of trying to do it all for free, the main ones being:

1. Hosting Ads – A free site will be covered in ads (and no, you won't make money from them)
2. Poor Domain Name – It's hard to impress site visitors to “yourfreewebsite.buildername.com”
3. Limited Bandwidth – This will choke the growth potential of your website
4. Facebook Won't Help – Don't be tempted to use a free Facebook page to promote your brand instead
5. A Proper Site for a Few Dollars – For a small monthly fee, you can avoid the drawbacks of a free site

Our Wix recommendation is based on thorough independent testing. We challenged website first-timers and experienced web designers to use Wix, and took on board their thorough feedback about its ease-of-use and features.

We also rate the help and support, plug-ins, value-for-money and more when rating a website builder.

For more, see our full Tech.co review of Wix

The True Cost of a Free Website

Remember, your website is your brand – it's your first chance to make an impression on potential customers, clients or followers. The drawbacks of a free website mean that this first impression could be a poor one. Below, we explain in more detail each of the reasons why you should consider spending just a few dollars per month, rather than compromise your website by creating it for free:

1. Free Websites Host Ads

If you’re trying to run a website for free – whether that’s with WordPress, Wix or any other type of website building platform, you’ll have to host ads on your site.

You might think that the internet is littered with ads, and having ads on your site in order to save a few dollars wouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong. If you’re building your site to help your business, or you’re looking to run a blog or even if your website is your business, having ads on your site will harm its performance for a number of reasons.

Ads make websites run slower. Every time a user visits your website, they will need to load all the ads on your site as well as all of your great content. This means that, through no fault of your own, users will lose interest in your site and leave.

53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load – Google

Ads will make your site look worse – this is true for all sites. If you’ve sunk hours into designing the layout and style of all your pages, it makes no sense to have them covered in ads.

Ads might make your site seem untrustworthy. This is subjective, but if your site has lots of low-quality, seemingly unrelated ads, it will likely turn users off, and make them try to find a different website.

But hey, isn’t there at least some money in it for you? Sadly not. In most cases, the ads will be for the free website builder you’re using – you won’t make any money from visitors clicking on them.

2. You Won’t Get a Good Domain Name on a Free Website

Your domain name is the main part of the URL web address (everything that comes before ‘.com’ or ‘co.uk’, for example).

A poor URL doesn’t look good, it won’t be memorable, and your site will be penalized by Google

With a clear and simple URL, users will be able to work out exactly what your site is about, and what they can expect. However, with a free site, you won’t get a URL like this. Instead, you’ll likely get something similar to your desired website name, along with a string of letters or numbers, and the name of the service you used to create your site.

It doesn’t look good. It won’t be memorable, and your site will be penalized by Google in its search results – the search engine giant considers websites with URLs like the below to be untrustworthy.

Overall, the effect of not having a good domain name will be twofold – Google will make your site harder to find, and, if users do find it, they will think your site looks unprofessional and untrustworthy.

3. You’ll Have Limited Bandwidth on a Free Site

If you try to use a free website builder, or a free hosting service, your site’s bandwidth will be limited.

If there’s one reason why you should avoid a free website, above all others, it’s probably this one.

This essentially means that only a certain number of users will be able to visit your site within a given period. If you’re limited to 5GB bandwidth per month, this means that after users have loaded 5GB’s worth of data from your site, it will stop responding.

As you can probably imagine, this will leave a bitter taste in the mouth, and these users certainly won’t be giving your site a second chance.

If there’s one reason why you should avoid a free website, above all others, it’s probably this one. The fact that your website will simply stop responding should be enough to make you think twice about a free website.

4. You Won’t Get By With a Facebook Page, Either

With sites such as Facebook or Twitter allowing you to host pages for business or personal use for free, it’s tempting to use these in place of a website. A Facebook business page will still be surfaced easily, after all.

However, social media pages are quite limited in terms of features. Sure, you can list your business address and contact information on your pages but, again, it will be harder for users to find your pages via Google – a potentially important source of traffic.

You won’t get access to some features that would be thrown in with a website builder such as food menus if you’re running a restaurant or cafe, for example.

If you’re serious about your online work, have a Facebook and Twitter page as well as a website.

5. A Great Website Will Only Cost You a Few Dollars Per Month

If you’re committed to your site, there’s no reason not to pay for it. You’ll receive get a proper URL, no ads, more and better features and it will be super easy to find your site online.

Creating your own website doesn't need to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, you can get started with a solid website builder like Hostinger for as little as $2.99 per month. Sure, it'll be a stripped-down version compared to some of the best website builders out there – it only scores 3.6/5 compared to Wix's 4.8/5 – but if you're on a budget, it's a pretty good start.

Now, if you're looking for a website builder that can handle a lot of visitors, provide robust analytics for your business, and even allow the creation of an online store, you're probably going to have to pay a bit more. The average website builder for business (like Webflow's Starter plan) is going to cost you at least $12 per month, with ecommerce plans costing closer to $24 per month and designer-focused builder plans like Editor X's Essentials plan starting at $22 per user, per month.

If you're looking for a little guidance on which website builder to go for, our top-rated website builder is Wix, which scores 4.8/5 for features overall (1st), 4.9/5 for help & support (joint 1st), and 4.4/5 for ease of use (joint 1st). It has fantastic templates and a remarkably easy-to-use page editor that can bring all your website dreams to life. What's more, Wix is pretty cheap, particularly considering it offers the most features of any website builder on the market. It offers a full free plan but its paid-for plans start from $16 per month, which includes hosting if you choose annual billing. Given these prices and these features, you really can't beat Wix when it comes to value.

Having trouble narrowing down your search for a good website builder? Take our comparison quiz to find a provider that fits your exact needs, based on hundreds of hours of in-depth research.

Great, Low Cost Website Builders

Wix is definitely our favorite website builder for businesses of all types and sizes, but that doesn't mean it's right for you and your business. Fortunately, there are plenty of other options out there that represent solid choices, depending on your needs.

Squarespace, for example, is quite comparable to Wix and also scores 4.8/5 overall. It provides a whole lot of features, a bunch of marketing functionality, and easily the most beautiful templates in the website-building industry, which helped it to a 4.8/5 score for website functionality. It's not ideal for ecommerce, especially compared to Wix, but it can get the job done if you need it to.

Another one of our favorite picks for website builders is GoDaddy. It's not nearly as robust as Wix or Squarespace with a less impressive overall score of 4.1/5, but it provides the easiest and quickest setup process in the industry.

You can go from no online presence to a comprehensive website in a matter of minutes, thanks to its ADI program that allows you to input criteria and have the site made for you. What's more, GoDaddy's SEO score improved from 3/5 to 4/5 on our 2023 tests, and its site speed improved by 7.14%, which will help you create a better all-around experience.

Finally, if you're specifically trying to create an ecommerce website with an online store, Shopify is another great Wix alternative. It provides some serious functionality when it comes to ecommerce, making it perfect for larger businesses looking to move a lot of products – and with an average customer score of 4.8/5, clearly, Shopify users are reaping the rewards. See all our top picks, below, or learn more about our research and testing, here.

Remember, when the service is free, you’re the product. Creating a paid-for site will give you a better website, with more features, and it won’t cost a fortune.