Whether you’re building your personal blog or taking baby steps for your online store, you can absolutely design your own website using a free website builder with no sweat.
In this blog, we will share the free website builders available on the market and we will help you assess whether a free plan can lead you to your business objectives.
Can a Free Website Achieve Your Goals?
Sure, if your goal is to test the waters and create a website to establish your online presence, you can definitely design your own free website even without coding knowledge. The truth is most website builders have a free version that gets the job done.
For most bloggers and those who don’t need a nice design, a free website is perfect. With the drag-and-drop system, you can see where your web design elements will go, or you can choose a template for a quick project.
However, this approach is not sustainable if you plan to scale your business website with advanced features or a custom design. At some point in your journey, you’ll likely need to shell out money to invest in a professional website.
The Cost Of Building A Website
The website building process can get quite expensive, and when you invest in anything there is usually the inherent stress that the product will perform well. When you decide it’s time to upgrade and hire a web design professional, you’ll need to prepare for the cost of web development and also pay for a custom domain name and web hosting. After you pay for your own domain registration, you still have to pay for other maintenance services, email systems and SEO services to grow your business.
Choosing The Best Free Website Builder
The good thing about drag and drop platforms is that they’re easy to learn and use, even for the least technical of users. Since these are free, you can try a few out to see which one you like the most.
Wix
If you are looking for the best website builder, you might have stumbled upon Wix. It’s the most-loved free website builder for small business owners and freelancers because the majority of the templates are free, except for online stores (eCommerce) who process payments in one of the premium plans.
Compared to other free website builders, you can speed up the website creation process by choosing from the 800+ templates across 90 categories. Here are some more features:
Features of Wix
If you’re building your very first site or you just want to try Wix out, here are the features that may interest you the most:
- User-friendly website editor – What makes Wix’s editor so popular is the fact that you can drag elements and drop anything, just like what professional websites look like.
- Free Apps – Wix App Market offers decent free site apps to keep you moving. Though not all are free, you can get apps to help you with contact forms, event calendars, and social media integration.
- Marketing Tools – Unlike other different website builders, you can boost your marketing efforts with its free marketing tools. You can upgrade to a paid plan to get more advanced analytics for things like search engine optimization and email marketing.
WordPress.com
Although it is branded as a free website builder, WordPress.com (not WordPress.org) is more like a content management system that you can flexibly use for different purposes. Indeed, it is the right website builder to create a website to publish your blog.
Features & Ease of Use
- 100+ Free Professional Themes Choose the layout of your website from a wide variety of free themes that you can easily customize.
- Built-in Portfolio Feature- Even without a web developer, you can quickly create a portfolio using this website builder. You just need to add pages to your portfolio, and it will show off your work for you.
- Marketing and SEO Tools – Some free plugins are there to add spice to your website, especially if you want to check how it performs on search engines. However, most plug-ins are available on paid plans.
There are other website builders you can explore, such as:
Strikingly – perfect for landing pages.
Webnodes – for mobile-friendly and aesthetic sites.
Site123 – for straightforward web designing.
Weebly – create unlimited pages easily.
While a free website builder can get your site live on the internet, it comes with obvious limitations. At Direct Allied Agency in Tulsa, we help business owners decide which route is best for every specific situation, whether that be a free DIY approach, a pre-built template in WordPress, or we can even create a website design from scratch to adequately reflect your brand at an affordable price. Call us any time if you have any inquiries.
