11 Best (REALLY FREE) Website Builders in 2024

Many website builders offer free plans, but sometimes “free” isn’t what it seems. In many cases, you start building your site for free, only to discover, after you’ve already invested the work, that the free plan is way too limited to actually use. This is how “free” website builders try to force you to whip out your credit card.

I decided to test some of the major website builders out there, to find out which ones will actually let you build a functional site for free. Now, when I say “test,” I mean real tests. I built a demo site with each site builder on this list, to see what exactly they would and wouldn’t let me do on the free plan.

This was an interesting journey, and I discovered a few very surprising things along the way. Sure, all free builders have their limitations, but some will let you do much more than others. Wix’s free plan is probably the most generous1, but I also found some other good options to recommend.

1. Wix – The Best for Maximum Creative Freedom1

1 Wix has been at the forefront of the website builder industry for quite some time, constantly evolving. As such, it has one of the most feature-filled site builders around, and it shows.

Wix also has one of the better free plans around, as it grants you access to almost every feature for free, with a few notable exceptions such as e-commerce. There’s truly no reason you couldn’t use Wix’s free plan1 forever, more or less. All of Wix’s templates are available on the free plan, and they look good.

There’s one small downside: the creative freedom and extensive site options all mean that building a site with Wix is more complex than with some of the other platforms. It’s not too bad, and you could probably create a great site from scratch in a couple of hours, but it may take some time to get used to how things work.

Features

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:

• 900+ Templates – One of Wix’s best features is the simply massive template library. Some templates are better than others, some are a bit dated, but in my professional opinion, most are quite good.
• Complete Drag-and-Drop Freedom – What makes Wix’s editor so popular is the fact that you can drag and drop anything and place it anywhere on the page. Well, almost anywhere, but it’s still a lot of creative freedom compared to other builders.
• Free Apps – Wix App Market offers a pretty impressive library of apps to extend your site’s functionality, and even integrate it with third-party services. Now, not all of these apps are free. You may have to pay for some individually. But there are enough free apps to get you started with social media integration, advanced forms, event calendars, and much more.
• Marketing Tools – Need to get the word out about your site? Wix more than has you covered with SEO tools, email marketing, a social post designer – all for free. You’d have to upgrade to a paid plan to access more advanced analytics, the “Site Booster” app, and a few other perks like free ad credits.
• Blogging Tools – The Wix Blog is technically one of the “apps,” but it’s free, and it’s not that bad at all. You can create engaging, custom-designed blog posts easily enough, though you can’t just drag and drop content around like in the main site editor.

Summary

2. Squarespace – Professionally Designed, Highly Visual Templates1

Squarespace is often praised for its striking templates. These designs come with the space to present your work in the best possible light, but you can pick any template – even if it’s not specifically built for your niche – and make it yours with a few tweaks.

The block editor lets you choose from a series of page layouts and gives you plenty of freedom to customize the look of your site.

The page elements (buttons, headers, etc.) snap to a grid, so you can’t place them anywhere you’d like – but there’s an upside to this limitation. Squarespace’s layouts are well-thought-out, and when you work according to the grid, everything stays neat and aligned, without distracting visitors from the real star of the show – your work.

Squarespace has a series of eight different gallery layouts to display photos of your products or services, in addition to layouts for appointment scheduling, contact forms, customer reviews, and more.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a free forever plan, but Squarespace does offer a 14-day free trial.

Features

• Built-in image editing. Squarespace boasts the most image editing options, allowing you to make a range of adjustments (e.g., brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, shadows) so your visuals look their best.
• E-commerce functionality. You can sell pretty much anything you want, from digital and physical products to services and even gift cards. You can keep track of all sales from your dashboard.
• Integrated marketing. When it comes to spreading the word about your site, few other builders offer as many tools as Squarespace: social media, email marketing, and SEO are all integrated, and you can manage it all from your account.
• Unlimited bandwidth and storage. Squarespace doesn’t put a cap on your bandwidth or storage, which is particularly useful for media-heavy websites.

Summary

3. Jimdo – The Quickest Way to Build a Website1

Thanks to its AI technology, Jimdo can take you from sign-up to finished website in a swift three minutes.

The AI feature is called Jimdo Dolphin, and it works by asking you a few questions about your business and design preferences. The result is a very basic website, but you can have it up and running in no time.

If you don’t want to use the AI tool, you can manually select a template to get started. Jimdo’s templates look good, though I wouldn’t say they’re quite as nice as the ones you’ll find on other website builders like Wix or Squarespace. On the plus side, Jimdo’s templates are mobile-responsive, so that’s one less thing you have to worry about.

Features

• Simple photo galleries to showcase your work. Jimdo allows you to easily design the photo gallery you want. Select one of the layouts for a horizontal, vertical, grid, or slideshow display, then size and space your images, and enable a lightbox effect for improved image quality.
• Online store for physical products. List up to five physical products in your store on the free plan and accept payments through PayPal. Alternatively, you can upgrade your plan to sell more and increase payment options.
• Create your own logo. If you need a logo, you’re in luck. We tested out the Jimdo Logo Creator, and it’s super easy to use. Use your new logo to brand your website and all of your other marketing materials.
• Keep visitors engaged with a blog. Start a free blog to share tips, include stories of your work, or explain more about your experience and services. Embed videos and photo galleries or list store items in every post.

Summary

4. SITE123 – One of the Easiest Site Builders Out There

1

1 SITE123 bills itself as “By far the easiest free website builder.” Well, I haven’t tried every website builder in the world (although sometimes it feels like I have), but I can tell you that it’s darned easy to get a site up and running with SITE1231. Like, give it about five minutes, and then all you have to do is add your own content.

The limitation of this system is that you don’t get complete creative control, but the free plan is generous enough that you can use it for as long as you need.

Features 

In general, SITE123’s free features are solid, but they’re very simple. You can get a few more customization options if you upgrade to a paid plan, but here’s the fun free stuff:

• Modular Design System – So there’s good news and “meh” news. SITE123’s design system is super simple to use1, and offers easy ways to make your site fit your brand. Changing colors, fonts, and images is a matter of only a few clicks. The “bad” news is that you can’t just drag and drop things wherever you like. You have to choose from pre-designed page elements. It’s not bad, just kind of inflexible.
  I should also mention again that your customization options are a bit limited on the free plan.
• Blogging – Yup, you get a built-in blog with the free plan, as shown in the demo site. It’s a simple system with tags, thumbnail images, post scheduling, and a classic, Microsoft-Word-style text editor.
• Contact and Donation Forms – If you want to build your own custom form or run an online store, you’ll need to pay. But if you just need a simple contact form, or a way for people to donate to your nonprofit, that’s all free.
• Small Business Tools – Event calendars, appointment scheduling, restaurant reservations, and a few more options are all available in the “pages” menu. Just pick one and go.

Summary

5. Weebly – Offers Free E-commerce, but Only in Some Locations1

1 Weebly is another veteran of the site builder industry, and almost gives the likes of Wix and Squarespace a run for their money in terms of features and cheap prices1. The templates are pretty, the site editor is smooth, and so it’s here on my list.

Weebly is a site editor that doesn’t try to do everything for you. There was no AI-lite thing trying to build my site for me, and I had to provide my own demo content. Well, that second one is more of a reviewer’s problem, because you’ll want to write your own content anyway.

Whether the platform’s focus on letting you do things for yourself is a bonus or a problem will depend on… well, you.

Features 

• Block-Based Drag-and-Drop Design – While Weebly has a somewhat small number of themes (this is what they call templates), they are well-made and quite pretty. Within those themes, you can drag and drop blocks of content (text, images, menus, maps, etc.) into almost any layout you like. Not “anywhere on the page,” like with Wix, but you do have quite a bit of control over the final design.
• Blogging – You can edit your blog posts in the site editor itself, which I like. You can drag and drop blocks of content and functionality into blog posts just like you can with any other page, though without the same layout flexibility.
• Free Ecommerce (in Some Countries) – Okay, this feature isn’t available in every country, but in the US and a few other locations, you can set up a store and sell products for free. The only limitation to this feature is that on the free and cheaper plans, there is no shopping cart. Customers would have to buy products one at a time.
• Free Apps – Weebly’s App Market includes free apps, premium apps, and apps with both free and premium plans. You can use them to integrate your site with social networks, create advanced forms, and more.
• Free SEO/Marketing Tools – On the free plan, these tools are rather basic, but still useful. As far as SEO goes, you can customize all of your pages’ metadata manually. As for marketing, there’s a tool for taking newsletter sign-ups. You can also embed surveys, and monetize your site with Google AdSense, all on the free plan.
  This is quite impressive, as most site builder free plans won’t let you monetize your site at all.

Summary

6. WordPress.com – By Far The Best Free Blogging Platform1

1 WordPress powers over a third of the Internet in one way or another. It started off as a blogging application, and now it’s the single biggest publishing platform in the world. For clarity’s sake, this article is discussing WordPress.com, which is sort of a site builder, not WordPress.org, which is home to the original software.

And though WordPress.com bills itself as a site builder, it works much more like an old-fashioned content management system (CMS). That means it’s very flexible and powerful, but it takes a bit of time to learn. You don’t get the same drag-and-drop functionality you get with other builders.

WordPress.com is pretty good at explaining what you need to do, but the nature of the software can leave you feeling a bit confused. There’s just… so much. And so many things that are walled off behind more expensive plans.

Listen, I have extensive experience with WordPress, and I love it, but there are definitely easier options on this list.

Features

• One of the Best Blogs Around – WordPress is, first and foremost, blogging software. You can make it do just about anything else, but that takes time. If you just want a solid blog, or a simple business site with a blog, WordPress.com can do it well.
• Over 100 Fantastic Free Themes – As an old-school CMS, WordPress is very theme-based. While you do have some control over the layout of your content, most of the design choices will be made “for you” by the theme you choose. Some themes are highly customizable, but not all.
• Built-in Portfolio Feature – One thing WordPress.com has that the original software doesn’t is the ability to quickly and easily build a portfolio on your site. You basically add pages in the Portfolio section of your site, and certain themes (such as the one in the demo) will display your portfolio pieces automatically.
• Marketing and SEO Tools – Not a lot to say here: analytics, newsletters, SEO. The gang’s all here. A lot of the more advanced SEO functionality is provided by plugins rather than WordPress itself; plugins, unfortunately, are locked behind the paid plans.

Summary

7. SimpleSite – It’s Extremely Simple Alright1

1 SimpleSite definitely lives up to its name. It helps you make sites, and the sites are very simple. Have I said that enough? Probably, but by now you should understand SimpleSite’s whole deal.

With that simplicity, however, comes a shortage of features. This site builder isn’t designed to do a whole lot. The company advertises the ability to start a blog, but I actually couldn’t find that functionality anywhere. I don’t know if it’s a premium feature or not, but it’s definitely not there for free users.

Features

• Change the Look of Your Site – After you choose a template, you can’t easily switch to another, but you can customize all colors and fonts.
• Flexible Content Layout – You do actually get some control over how you lay out your content. I actually couldn’t figure out how to make vertical columns of content the last time I tried the editor for a different article, but I managed it this time.
• Useful Content Widgets – I’m mostly talking about the ability to embed videos and maps in your page content. That’s not a lot, but it’s useful.
• Contact Forms – If you want to give people an easy way to write you an email from your site, you need a contact form. Enough said.

Summary

8. Elementor – The Best Site Builder Plugin, but the Free Plan Is Limited1

1 Elementor is a WordPress plugin that gives it proper drag-and-drop site design functionality. You can install it for free on a WordPress site on your own server, or you can pay money to access plugins on WordPress.com, and install it there.

Since Elementor is so big, I thought it was worth a mention, but in my opinion, it’s not great for free users. If you want a free website, you can get much more from Wix.

Here’s the thing though, it’s not actually a bad product. If you want to design a custom site based on WordPress without coding, Elementor is actually really good at that. It’s also quite easy to use once you familiarize yourself with the basic controls. The main downsides are that you have to already have some knowledge of design to make anything more than a nearly-blank site, and that the free version has very limited options.

Features

• Page and Content Templates – There are loads of templates that will set up entire pages, or just sections of pages, for you. It should be mentioned though, that these templates might clash with the WordPress theme you have installed. Also, most of them (including templates for things like site navigation) are locked behind the Pro plan.
  
• Basic Content Widgets – And that’s it. You get text, image embedding, basic image galleries, image sliders, and a few other useful things. You frankly almost get more from the free plan on WordPress.com.
• Addons – Yep, in the world of WordPress, there are addons to plugins. Basically, these are other WordPress plugins that extend the functionality of Elementor with new kinds of content blocks. Because why not?

Summary

9. Webnode – Fast and Pretty Sites1

1 The sites you can make with Webnode are fast and pretty, the software is easy to use, and the platform boasts over 40 million users.

That all sounds impressive, and my actual experience with the software was pleasant enough, but the free plan1 is very limited in terms of what you can do with it when compared to other options on this list. Your storage space is small, and almost all the shinier features are locked away behind the paid plans.

Features

• Lightly Customizable Templates – Though you do get some control over how your content is laid out, most aspects of the look and feel of your site will be determined by the template you choose. It’s a good thing they’re pretty. You can customize fonts and colors, though, so that helps.
• Mobile Editor – A lot of site builders actually provide a terrible experience, or just don’t work, on mobile devices. Webnode is one of the exceptions – you can easily edit your site on your phone or tablet.
• Blogging – Again, I do love it when I can edit blog posts in almost the same way I edit any other page. You can add pretty much all the same kinds of content, too, including tables, forms, maps, and more.
• Google AdSense – Yep, you can throw some ads on your free site. Oddly, Google Analytics is reserved for a paid plan. Go figure.
• Add (small bits of) Code to the HTML – It’s a minor thing, but being able to inject your own code into the page (such as third-party analytics code) is a nice perk.

Summary

10. Strikingly – Excellent One-Page Websites1

1 Strikingly is all about that one-page website, as long as you’re on the free plan1. Okay, if you add a blog or a store, you technically get more pages, and paid plans will let you build normal multi-page sites. Otherwise, everything on your site will be on the “homepage.” If you’re looking for a quick way to introduce yourself and what you do, in a CV or portfolio site, for instance, this might well be the way to do it.

Of course, this emphasis on simplicity means that creating more complex sites is more or less out of the question. But then, you don’t always need something complex.

Features

• A Very Simple (Though Limited) Site Editor – Strikingly’s design system is one where you can choose from one of a limited number of templates to start, then choose “sections” or blocks of content to add to your homepage. You cannot create any sort of custom layout unless you pay for one of the premium plans, though.
• Blogging – Strikingly has solid blogging features, including the usual things like categorizing, tagging, and scheduling posts. I do like that you can edit your blog posts via much the same interface as you use to edit the rest of your site, and you can see exactly what your post will look like.
• Marketing and Analytics Tools – You’ll find the usual SEO tools here, as well as email and some built-in analytics tools. Newsletter sign-up forms are available as well.
• Social Integration Features – Beyond simply adding icons that take people to your social feeds, you’ll find a couple of other neat tools in here, like the ability to embed all of your social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram right into your page.

Summary

11. Mozello – A Quite Generous Free Plan1

1 Mozello is a site builder targeted directly at small businesses, I’d say. Its feature-set, though limited, is great for anyone who wants to attract new customers, and pretty much all of the templates are business or store-themed. There isn’t a lot of design variety, but the platform is good at what it’s designed to do.

The platform is quite easy to use, though it might take you a minute to get the hang of where all the buttons are. Options for editing your page layout are simple, but you actually have to click a separate button to start editing the layout instead of the content. It’s not how most builders work, but it’s simple to get the hang of.

Features

• Template and Block-Based Design – At first glance, the templates are going to look a bit plain and boring, but don’t be fooled. They’re just flexible enough, and easily allow you to switch out fonts, colors, and content layouts. You can’t do much about the layout of the overall template, but you can choose from quite a few handy content layouts.
• Custom Form Builder – Here’s something you don’t see on every free plan. It’s really as simple as adding a form to your page. You can then add text boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, and other basic form input types.
• A Limited Online Store – That’s right, you can sell stuff on the free plan. Sure, you can only sell five products, and the only payment method supported is PayPal. That’s not a lot. But if you’re selling your first book online, for example, that could be a great start!
• Marketing Tools – Mozello gives you basic SEO tools, email marketing, and integration with Google Analytics. I do like that they specifically advertise that you can access the HTML code (in a limited fashion) to put in your own analytics tracking code.

Summary

When Should I Upgrade to a Paid Plan?

The answer is generally simple: when you’ve reached the limits of what you can do with the free plan of your chosen site builder, it’s time to pull out your credit card. When you’ve run out of storage, or you’re getting enough traffic to use up the bandwidth available to you, you’re not going to have much of a choice.

Other possible signs it’s time to upgrade:

• You want to have more control over your branding, and choose your own domain name.
• You want to have more control over your branding, and you’re annoyed by the ads on your free site.
• You want to have an online store with lots of products in it.
• You just want access to features (like advanced apps or addons) that the free plan doesn’t have.

Which Free Site Builder Is the Best for You?

Many of the free plans for site builders are similar, so I’d strongly encourage you to look at the feature sets on each platform, and what sorts of sites each one is focused on. Even if you’re building a free website, you don’t want to have to make too many compromises.

Do you need creative freedom? You can’t go wrong with Wix1, which lets you customize just about every aspect of your site.

Do you need to get your website online quickly? You’ll love the efficiency of Jimdo1.