Best Free Website Builders Compared

Many free website builders advertise as “free” but charge extra for basic features (like publishing your site), limit design flexibility, place obnoxious ads all over, and fail to provide the support you need to get started—they’re not all created equal despite the $0 price tag. After testing over a dozen options, we found one that delivers where others fall short: Wix. Unlike its competitors that charge hidden fees or don’t let you publish until you pay, WIx is actually free. The ads are relatively subtle, there are dozens of free features, and you get access to the same flexible site builder as you would on a paid plan.

The Best Free Website Builders for Most

Wix gives you total control over every aspect of your website, including the colors, buttons, images, and more. It’s the simplest way to create an eye-catching site for free, without any hassles or headaches. Wix also handles all of the backend infrastructure, security, and other technical details, so you won’t have to worry about anything. Sign up, free forever today!

WordPress with Hostinger is the perfect combination for bloggers. As an open-source platform, WordPress is the most customizable builder on our list. Paired with Hostinger, you’re getting a top-rated hosting provider with security and performance optimized for your blog. Create your WordPress account or get started with Hostinger today.

Need something simpler and easy to manage? Weebly is the easiest website builder on the market and it’s a great choice for small or local business owners who want to establish their presence online. Sign up to publish a professional site in less than an hour.

The 5 Best Free Website Builders 

1. Wix – Best for most
2. WordPress – Best free website builder for blogging 
3. Weebly – Best free website builder for small business owners
4. Strikingly – Best free landing page builder
5. Site123 – Best free website builder for beginners

When It Makes Sense to Use a Free Website Builder

As with most things that are free, you’re not going to get the same things as a paying customer. While free website builders are appealing in theory, they present a lot of drawbacks that can be real dealbreakers for most people, including:

• Limited customization options and lower quality templates
• Third-party ads you can’t control
• An unprofessional subdomain that’s hard to remember
• No support for ecommerce
• Lack of ownership over your content
• Minimal or no customer support

However, the worst part is that it’s tricky or impossible to move your site to a different platform.

With most free builders, you’ll be locked into that builder forever—or have to rebuild your entire site from scratch if you move elsewhere.

Because of these limitations, we usually recommend avoiding free web hosting and website builders because they’re too limited. Plus, starting a business means investing real money in the things that matter. Cheap web hosting is a much better place to start for most folks. If you can spare a few dollars a month and are serious about building and growing a website, we highly recommend it.

However, there are a few situations where the drawbacks of a free website builder aren’t as big of a deal.

For personal portfolios or small freelance side projects, a free website builder provides an easy way to create a simple but attractive online space to showcase your work.

Non-profits are another example. A free website can be perfect for sharing details about your cause, promoting events, publishing newsletters and engaging volunteers. As long as members and donors can find what they need, an advanced custom website isn’t necessarily a requirement.

If you’re a local or small service-based business, a free website builder could be all you need to create a simple website with contact details, hours of operation, and updates for your customers.

Temporary projects are also good contenders since you don’t have to worry about switching platforms later.

#1 – Wix  — Best Free Website Builder For Most

Wix offers a free website builder that you’ll fall in love with. It powers more than 100 million websites and its flexibility continues to surprise even the most advanced users of this website builder. 

It’s not only the hundreds of templates that make Wix so customizable—the drag-and-drop editor gives you the power to control what pops off of your web page. 

So, you can create a gorgeous website without knowing one line of code. 

What we also found great was the completely hands-off approach Wix offers. 

If you don’t want to spend time designing your site, the artificial design intelligence (ADI) software will ask you a series of questions and Wix will design your site for you. 

For example, Wix will ask what industry you work in, what services or goods you provide, and a few other questions before putting together the right site for you. 

Another thing we really love is the ability to utilize the hundreds of integrations available in the Wix App Market. Which isn’t something many other website builders offer at the free level. Wix’s app marketplace has more than 280,000 apps available. 

Plus, Wix offers marketing tools and standard SEO optimization free of charge, which will help you rank higher on Google faster while also building your organic web traffic. 

Wix even includes web hosting, live chat widgets, and even more features with its free forever site builder.

Wix’s free plan includes managed security, too. The security pros at Wix monitor their data centers and sites for security vulnerabilities and make sure that everything meets the highest industry standards for data privacy and protection from cyberthreats. You don’t have to do a thing, they handle this for you.

If you want more information, we compiled a detailed Wix review. Wix excels at being extremely easy to use, yet it delivers multiple customization options (some of which, admittedly, are in its paid tiers). This is not an easy balance to create, yet Wix’s designers were successful.

Whenever you are ready to move beyond the free plan that Wix offers, it has several pricing tiers available. Having several choices simplifies the process of finding a tier that has the features you want at the price point you need.

One thing you won’t be able to get as part of the free plan is a custom URL. You can find more information about both the free version and the pricing plans at Wix.com.

#2 – WordPress — The Best Free Website Builder for Blogging 

WordPress has all the features you need to run a successful blog in a convenient package. Just pick a website theme from the hundreds of available templates and build your site out to make it look exactly how you’d like.

With WordPress, the sky’s the limit for what you want to do with your blog. It’s eminently customizable because of the dizzying array of themes, plugins, features, and tools available to you.

Now, there’s one key distinction to make here. There are two very similar yet different forms of WordPress to choose from.

First, you have WordPress.com, which is pictured above in the screenshot. This is the easiest, most straightforward way to start a blog today. We named WordPress as the best blogging platform option.

All you have to do is sign up for a WordPress account and start building your blog for free. Even on WordPress.com’s free plan, you can utilize one of dozens of themes, have a preinstalled SSL certificate, and utilize the essential features of Jetpack, a plugin that helps with security and SEO efforts.

WordPress.com’s paid plans provide bonuses like a free domain name for one year, more customization, ecommerce tools like accepting payments on your site, and more. Those start at just $4 per month.

But you can start free and build to your heart’s content until you run into any blockers on your growth.

WordPress.com is the best option if you want to quickly get a simple site off the ground in minutes, completely for free. To learn more about the available features, check out our full WordPress review.

If you have more robust needs, want a website you can continue building out for months or years, or want complete freedom to design and shape your WordPress site into what you’re dreaming of, consider instead WordPress.org.

The big difference here is that WordPress.org is the open-source platform that WordPress.com is built upon. By using WordPress.org, you can take your site in any direction you’d like. Choose premium themes from one of the many markets on the web, add powerful ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce, and so much more.

Be aware, though, that while WordPress.com comes with web hosting included, WordPress.org does not. It’s up to you to find a hosting provider so your WordPress.org site can go live.

Fortunately, WordPress itself has a list of recommended hosts. And, of those, we think Hostinger is one of the best options you can go with (even if you weren’t running a WordPress site).

Granted, while WordPress.org costs nothing to use, paying for hosting makes this a not-completely-free site building solution. But Hostinger keeps their rates extremely affordable, so you’ll actually pay less per month for WordPress.org plus Hostinger hosting than you would for any of WordPress.com’s paid plans.

Plus, you’ll get a free custom domain with Hostinger hosting, sweetening the pot overall for you. We put together a detailed Hostinger review, so you can learn more about the available features.

So, if you’re comfortable with paying just over $35 for a year of quality web hosting, you can use the free WordPress.org platform to build a more complex, attractive, and incredible site than you ever could with any of the other free site builders on this list.

With WordPress, you’re really only limited by what you can dream up.

Sign up for a WordPress.com account here, or get started with Hostinger here if you want to use WordPress.org for your site.

#3 – Weebly — The Best Free Website Builder for Small Business Owners

Weebly is a user-friendly website builder designed for small businesses. It’s perfect for retailers that want to expand and sell online with an online store.

As a Square brand, you can easily integrate your physical store payments and accounting system with the website. Weebly even lets you set up an in-store pickup option for your customers. 

The drag-and-drop site builder from Weebly is easy to use and requires zero technical knowledge. It’s free and keeps your site modern with nice touches—including a mobile-friendly design.

One aspect of Weebly that we really like is how it reconfigures the webpage you’re building as you make changes. 

Having a real-time picture of how the page is going to look as you make changes further simplifies the page-building process. It also is helpful should you ever need to edit your pages in the future, as you can clearly see how small design changes affect the page.

Should you want to add advanced coding, such as through building custom HTML, you have this option with Weebly. However, there’s no need to know coding to use this service.

Weebly stands out from the crowd by providing functional, sleek, and results-driven online stores. The pages are fully customizable, and you have tons of design options to choose from.

You’ll also get inventory management tools included for free. Weebly has built-in SEO optimization tools to help improve your Google search rankings. You can set up designated landing pages and forms to use for lead captures as well.

Weebly has a nice level of features for an online store that’s part of a free website building tool.

Unlike most other free site builders, you receive live chat and email support 24/7 with Weebly. For the majority of other free builders, you only have access to self-help documents.

Should you need help while trying to create your first website, having access to this 24/7 support can be vital.

Ultimately, though, the greatest level of strength in Weebly’s free tier lies in its ability to give your small business an ability to create a blog for free. Blogs for businesses can be a nice way to generate traffic for your site, to give visitors advice on using your products or services, and to make news and announcements about your business.

If you have any questions about website building, the free Weebly community forum offers exceptional insight. Even on the free plan, Weebly gives you access to chat and email support.

Overall, Weebly has all the resources you need to build an ecommerce presence in a way that’s fast, easy, and cost-effective. Check out our detailed Weebly review for more information.

Whether you’re looking to start a small business online or to take your physical store to the web, you can get started for free with Weebly today.

#4 – Strikingly — The Best Free Landing Page Builder  

Strikingly offers one of the simplest website editors available. It allows you to make a full one-page website in under thirty minutes. Now that’s fast. 

Within an hour you can have the best landing page you ever created at no cost.

When you first come to Strikingly and start creating your site, you get a nice onboarding tour to walk you through picking a template and how to edit it. 

A landing page is one of the biggest tools for converting prospects, leads, and visitors, so being able to design them so well, so quickly is what makes Strikingly so unique.

You can also create unlimited one-page sites under the free plan and are given 5GB of bandwidth per month.

This is perfect for quickly building landing pages as your marketing campaigns begin and progress. Plus, being able to utilize a potentially unlimited number of free landing pages gives you plenty of opportunity to run A/B testing between strategies or segment leads through individualized pages.

Plus, Strikingly will give you simple web traffic analytics and easily integrate with your Google Analytics account so you can gain quick insight into how your landing pages are performing.

#5 – Site123  — The Best Free Website Builder for Beginners

If you are nervous about using website builder software, Site123 is the best way for a complete beginner to build a website.

In three easy steps you can establish your website and online presence. 

First, you start with selecting your website type. Site123 can quickly set up a page template for a business, a blog, an event page, or even handyman services.

Then, just add your business name and upload your content and images. Site123 will publish your site, with the whole process taking just about one hour. 

Keep in mind, with Site123 you don’t have complete creative control. But for beginners who just need a functional home on the web, this is ideal. 

Even with the array of website types and templates, your website will be mobile-friendly and SEO optimized without any complicated tasks required on your end. 

Also, you receive access to royalty-free images from Site123’s image bank, containing hundreds of stock images with no limitation of use. If you use your own content, you have 250MB of storage to utilize.

One thing to be aware of, though—Site123 only offers ecommerce functionality with its paid plan ($12.80/month). But, for a simple homepage or an online home that attracts visitors to call your physical business, Site123 is as simple and effective as it gets.

It’s okay to be apprehensive about designing your website for the first time. Site123 alleviates any concern you may have, because of their easy, hands-off, all-in-one website creation process. 

Methodology for Choosing the Best Free Website Builder

Free, usually means poor quality right? Well, not always.

With this list of free website builders, you can actually get more than you expect from a free solution. Here is how we examined these free options to pick out the best.   

Flexibility of Design

Having your hands tied when you want to add the one detail that can make your site unique is a terrible feeling. Imagine you want to add a “buy now” button in the header next to your navigation and the option is not available. 

Visitors want easy choices and an easy browsing experience. Having the right templates and color options, along with the freedom to add media where you want it, makes your site stand out and helps it become a conversion machine. 

It all depends on the type of site you want to make. If you need a unique, splashy ecommerce store, Wix and Weebly present the best bets. If you want a customizable blog, WordPress (with Hostinger hosting) is the way to go. For simpler needs, Strikingly and Site123’s free plans can do the trick.

Low Learning Curve

With a free website builder in particular, no one wants to waste time having to learn how to use it.

Wix, Strikingly, and Weebly all have very easy editors and can have you building a website in a few hours, even minutes if you use the artificial design intelligence software baked into Wix. 

If you’re new to the whole concept or a very small business that just needs a simple web presence, Site123 will take care of all the building for you, eliminating any learning curve at all.

Ecommerce Capability

Having the option to sell products or services is a common need for people building their own website. 

Most of the free website builders on this list offer ecommerce functionality and product marketing as part of their free plans. This is huge and gives you the ability to make money with minimal marketing costs. 

Wix even gives you the ability to capture leads using live chat and contact forms, use email marketing tools to make sales and manage campaigns, create promotional videos, and more. 

If you need a web store, make sure ecommerce is an option in your free website builder of choice.  

Minimal Advertising

Have you ever been on a site that had so many ads it was distracting? Weebly and Strikingly don’t put ads or their own branding on your free site, while Site123, Wix, and WordPress.com do (though they tend to be subtle and unobtrusive).

Keep this in mind if any ads are a dealbreaker. 

With Wix, it’s just a little sidebar saying the website was built with its platform. With WordPress, their general ad placements on your site help keep free features free. 

It all depends on what you’re comfortable with having on your site.

Trustworthy Brand

Even when you are selecting a free website builder, you want to have a product and brand name you can trust. No one wants to build a site for free, only to find that the no-name website builder is no longer in business six months later, forcing you to start from scratch.

Our list contains primarily well-known brands. Now, they may be known more for the paid website building tiers that they offer. But that’s okay, because you know you can trust the free tiers that they are offering, too.

Wix and WordPress are among the biggest names in the website-building market. They offer a wide range of services for those looking to build a large online store, those wanting to create a blog, and everything in between.

The good thing about making use of well-known free website builders is that you also have the option of upgrading to a paid tier in the future, should your website’s needs change. (We’ll discuss the importance of having upgrade options next.)

Low Cost to Upgrade

Let’s face it, we all want the best deal. Free is great and may be enough to get you up and running, but what if you need more because your website or business is taking off?

This list offers the most comprehensive free plans available, but also includes affordable monthly upgrades to a subscription that can be monthly or yearly. 

Having the ability to upgrade to a paid tier after you potentially outgrow the free tier is an important consideration. After all, it’s helpful to stick with the website builder you originally used. You already understand the interface and features, so migrating to a paid tier is easier after you use the free tier.

WordPress and Weebly’s lowest paid tiers are just $4 per month and $6 per month, respectively. With both, you unlock the ability to use a custom domain and access to more marketing and ecommerce tools.

This gives you the option to select a plan you can grow into and, if you decide it’s not for you, the risk is minimal. 

Expanding Your Knowledge: Best Free Website Builders

Summary

The best free website builder for most people is Wix. Its drag-and-drop builder is easy to use, and the platform can accommodate a wide range of use cases.

With that said, any of the recommendations in this guide are a viable option. Some are better for blogging, while others are best for specialized websites and stunning designs. Regardless of your needs, you can use the top picks and buying guide in this article to find the best free website builder for you.