Free website builders allow anyone to create a free business website to build an online presence quickly, easily and for free. We compared a dozen competitors before narrowing down our list to the best free website builders for small businesses. All are beginner-friendly, with tools for marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and e-commerce, as well as modern, pre-built templates and intuitive design tools.
- Best Free Website Builder Overall : Wix
- Best Free Ecommerce Website Builder: Weebly
- Best Way to Build a Free Business Website on Your Own Domain: HubSpot
- Best for service-oriented businesses: GoDaddy
- Best for one-page websites: Notable
- Best templates for quick website building: Webnode
- Most intuitive free website builder for beginners: Mozello
Best Free Website Builders at a Glance
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Reading: How to create a website for a small business free
*Monthly plan cost when billed annually**Renews to higher Ko after first year sten
Wix: Best Free Website Builder for Small Businesses Overall
Wix wins Best Free Website Builder for Small Businesses for several reasons. First, the drag-and-drop editor offers the most control over website design, and website stats show that 73% of businesses prioritize unique design. While your website will have Wix branding, this is the best way to create a free website that looks tailored to stand out and create credibility for your brand online.
Wix is known for the design freedom it offers puts it at the top of our list of the best drag-and-drop website builders. You can move elements around so you’re not limited to pre-set blocks of content.
Start with one of over 800 pre-built templates, a blank template or let Wix’s artificial intelligence (AI) template builder create one for you you. For more details, check out our step-by-step guide and video tutorial to better understand what it takes to create a Wix website.
Being found online is paramount for building a strong online brand presence, and no free website builder offers better SEO features than Wix. From fast website loading to automatic image compression and schema markup, learn more and find out why Wix tops our list of the best website builders for SEO.
There are also several important tools for search engine marketing (SEM) available in the Free Forever version. For example, you can set up Facebook and Instagram ads, and Wix’s AI will manage and test your ads and optimize your budget. GoDaddy also has paid social media advertising features, but only at the second paid tier.
Wix Pricing and Plans Overview
Best Free Wix Alternatives
Webnode is a better option for those who want to create a website as quickly as possible because their templates are well developed. Likewise, Mozello’s intuitive interface makes it a good choice for those who want to create and launch a small e-commerce website easily (up to five products in the free version) and in a short amount of time.
We found GoDaddy to be one of the easiest free website builders for beginners (along with Webnode). Plus, GoDaddy includes free appointment booking — something you can’t get with Wix or other free website builders. As such, GoDaddy is a better choice for service-oriented businesses (especially since you can take payments through PayPal) and sales teams. Its free website chatbots also offer benefits for the sales and customer support team.
Another downside to using Wix to build a free website is that you can’t sell online without at least at first Upgrading Ecommerce Plan for $27 per month. However, with paid plans starting at just $16, you can get some ecommerce features through apps on the marketplace. Alternatively, the best free website builder for ecommerce is Weebly’s Square-based website builder.
For more information on Wix’s features and who it’s best for, visit our Wix -Expert Review.
Our Expert Review
Wix is the best free website builder for small businesses that want maximum design freedom and solid SEO and marketing tools to grow. While upgrading to paid plans is more expensive than some other website builders, the ability to extend your website’s functionality through apps and integrations could be more than worth the cost.
Try Wix
Weebly : Best Free Ecommerce Website Builder for Online Stores
Owned by well-known payment processing company Square, Weebly is undoubtedly the best free ecommerce website builder. Most free website builders don’t include ecommerce features up to higher-tier plans, but Weebly lets you host an online store with unlimited products and multiple payment transaction options for free. Mozello also offers a free ecommerce plan, but it limits you to five products (vs. unlimited with Weebly).
Like GoDaddy, Weebly’s website editor is section-based with limited customization. Unlike most free drag-and-drop website builders on this list, you can’t just add a section by hovering over the website builder. Instead, you have to drag sections from the left menu and then add content to them. To learn more, check out our step-by-step guide to creating a Weebly website.
A major benefit of Weebly is that you can swap out your design at any time without changing your entire previous one Losing work, unlike most other small business website builders. It doesn’t offer as much design freedom as Wix, but for those who want a basic online store website with the flexibility to easily change templates, it might be a faster way to get your business online.
With online ordering and unlimited e-commerce are available in all plans. Weebly is also our pick for best restaurant website builder. Remember, if you want to use third-party apps like GloriaFood with Weebly, you’ll need to use the classic Weebly editor and opt for a paid plan. Still, the Square Editor has all the functionality most restaurant websites need.
Weebly Pricing and Features
Best Free Weebly Alternatives
Weebly is well-known free ecommerce website builder. While it offers unlimited ecommerce, it’s best suited for casual online sellers compared to large ecommerce businesses that would work better with Shopify.
Like Wix, Weebly doesn’t offer free website- Chatbots or appointment booking tools to the free plan – choose GoDaddy for that. Weebly isn’t nearly as intuitive for website design or customization as Wix, nor is it as beginner-friendly as the casual ecommerce site builder Mozello. Those who use the free Weebly editor for website design may be disappointed with its template selection. Both Webnode and Wix offer far more modern, advanced templates to choose from.
For more details on Weebly’s features and who it’s best for, see our Weebly expert review.
Our Expert Opinion
None of the other top website builders for small business comes close to the ecommerce functionality that you get for free with Weebly. Sell services and products and even accept donations without upgrading to a paid plan, knowing there are even more features available when you do.
Try Weebly
HubSpot: Best Way to Build a Free Business Website on Your Domain
We were thrilled to learn that HubSpot is making their content management system (CMS) free to build free landing pages and websites for to create small businesses. This is a game changer for startups and small businesses, setting the stage for those targeting larger competitors.
Learn how to create a HubSpot website in six steps, and see examples of websites built with HubSpot CMS. Your onboarding includes detailed step-by-step instructions – based on this checklist, you can create a website and get it online in as little as an hour if speed is key. Also included are demos and tutorials so you can quickly learn everything you can do with your site.
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While your site will still display HubSpot branding in the free version (which isn’t ideal for businesses), it is the only site builder that allows you to create a free business website on your own branded domain. You can also access HubSpot’s other free marketing, sales, and customer service tools, including the top-notch HubSpot CRM.
By integrating the free CRM with your HubSpot website, you can have an all-in-one Create one solution for sales, marketing and customer service. You have all the tools you need to generate leads through inbound marketing, ads, landing pages, and email marketing. This will help you convert leads into customers and turn them into repeat buyers and loyal patrons.
HubSpot CMS Pricing and Features
Best Free HubSpot CMS Alternatives
Web design stats show that about one in four people will leave a poorly designed website, so which template you start with is important. There are only about 40 free themes on HubSpot, and they’re limited in theme style. For unlimited access to 800+ templates, choose Wix. For modern and easy-to-edit free website templates, try Webnode.
None of the plans come with native ecommerce features, so all require plugins and integrations, unlike Weebly. Likewise, tools for appointments, reservations and online orders require plugins. Weebly is the best free website builder for online orders, while Wix is a better choice if you want all of these features built-in (albeit on a paid plan). Choose GoDaddy for website chatbots and appointment booking in a free website builder.
The biggest limitation of using HubSpot CMS to build a free business website is the page and article limitation. The free plan only allows for 25 websites, 20 landing pages, and 100 blog articles — not enough for businesses looking to implement a search engine optimization (SEO) content marketing plan to generate leads and sales.GoDaddy is a better alternative as there are no storage or page limits in the free version.
For more details on the main features of the HubSpot CMS and who it is best for, visit our HubSpot CMS -Expert report.
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot CMS is the best way to build a free business website on your own domain. Additionally, its top-notch sales, customer support, and marketing tools make HubSpot the best free website builder for a variety of business types and industries. This includes business-to-business (B2B) websites and sales and service-oriented companies that need contact management, lead generation, nurturing and conversion tools.
Visit HubSpot
GoDaddy: Best Free Website Builder for Service-Oriented Businesses
GoDaddy Website Builder is the best free website builder for service-oriented small businesses with appointment booking tools, website chatbots and reputation management features. For example, you can connect your Yelp and Google business profiles and up to three social media profiles and manage them from the dashboard. This is crucial as our roundup of startup stats shows that most consumers are active across multiple digital platforms.
With every plan, you get 24/7 chatbots to interact with website visitors, that can respond to prospect and customer inquiries and record information for follow-up. A “Hello” chatbot asks website visitors to specify what they want to talk to you about, while the “Order” chatbot recognizes order-related requests. The chatbots will then send the collected information to your inbox so you can help prospects and customers find what they are looking for more efficiently.
GoDaddy’s website builder has a robust appointment booking system. With the free plan, customers and prospects can book one-off appointments or set up meetings for demos or sales presentations. However, you’ll need a more expensive, upper-tier plan to accept payments with appointment bookings, set up recurring payments, set up events or classes, or have an online store.
To get started, read our article where describes how to create a website with GoDaddy. The free plan includes access to GoDaddy Studio, where you can create branded content, e.g. For example, a logo for your website and images for ads and social media posts. However, some templates are restricted to paying users. Still, for a startup or a solopreneur who needs a logo and graphics, the GoDaddy Studio represents value.
Prices and Features of GoDaddy Website Builder
The Best Free Alternatives to GoDaddy Website Builder
GoDaddy’s website builder is easy to use, but it’s not a true drag-and-drop editor, nor does it come with the extensive customization and templates that Wix offers. There are page-level settings for SEO. However, unlike Wix, access to GoDaddy’s Get Found on Google tools requires an upgrade to a paid plan.
GoDaddy’s free and lower plans do not include e-commerce functionality for online stores , so if you want to start selling online from day one, choose Weebly. Like most free website builders, GoDaddy doesn’t allow you to create a free website on your own domain without a paid plan – choose HubSpot for that. And neither plan comes with a free domain, unlike Wix, Weebly, and Strikingly.
GoDaddy users can’t choose a template, and template variations are limited. Turn to Webnode for modern, clean templates that will make your small business shine. Likewise, Mozello, while easy to use, is even easier to use, has better templates, and allows you to sell up to five products in the free version.
More details on GoDaddy website features- Builders and Who It Is Be sure to read our GoDaddy Website Builder Expert Review.
Our Expert Opinion
If your business is service-based or sales-oriented, GoDaddy is the best free website builder for your little business. Customers can book appointments or set up sales demonstrations, and chatbots interact with site visitors 24 hours a day to increase engagement and conversions.
Try GoDaddy
Outstanding: Best free website builder for one -page websites
One page websites are great for portfolios, solopreneurs, independent consultants, and any small business that wants a simple, clean, and minimalist website. Striking is our pick for the best free website builder for one-page websites. It’s also a starting point if you want to create multiple websites, since you can create two to five premium websites on paid plans.
Start with one of Strikingly’s many templates, then edit each section, to create your own. Multiple layout options are available to save you time and work, and you can easily delete or add pre-made sections to expand the content of your one-page website. Keep in mind that some sections are locked behind paid tiers, but plans start at $8 per month if you want access.
Similar to GoDaddy and Weebly, pages are section-based and editable tools are direct embedded in the panel.This makes it easy to customize fonts, sizes and colors, swap out images, and enter settings for sliders, videos, etc.
You can also take payments with the free site builder plan, with the option , Stripe, PayPal, Square or set up conditions to accept cash on delivery or another offline payment method. In addition, you can set an appointment event type, control what times appointments are available, appointment duration, location and more.
Big Pricing and Features
Best Free Alternatives to Strikingly
Basic site-level SEO settings are easily accessible in Strikingly, and you can add your Google and Bing tracking codes. Unlike Wix and Weebly, however, you’ll need a paid plan to embed custom code, and unlike Wix and HubSpot, there’s no SEO wizard or checklists. For SEO, Wix and HubSpot are the best overall.
You get ecommerce for free, but only for one product. Mozello allows five on the free plan, while Weebly users can offer unlimited physical products for sale online. Alternatively, if you’re good at processing payments through PayPal, GoDaddy is another viable option as a free ecommerce website builder.
It’s also notably one of the least intuitive free website builders on this list. Wix allows for the greatest design freedom with an editor that’s still easy to use, while GoDaddy’s section-based editor is much easier to navigate than Strikingly’s. The choice of templates is also limited on Strikingly, especially when compared to the huge selection of over 800 on Wix or the high quality of Webnode’s templates.
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Both the free plan and the first paid plan have you covered five limited pages per site. This isn’t enough for most small businesses, especially those looking to build organic web web traffic by ranking higher on Google. Wix allows unlimited pages on the free plan, and HubSpot (an excellent platform for content marketing) allows 25 on the free plan.
Our Expert Opinion
Strikingly’s unique use cases deserve it Place on this list of the best free website builders for small businesses, especially one-page websites. Although some features are missing in the free and basic plans, the Multi-Site Pro and VIP plans are also great for small agencies and those launching multiple small businesses.
Visit Strikingly
Webnode: Best Templates for Fast Website Design
Webnode’s biggest advantage over other free website builders is its templates. They are visually striking, which can captivate site visitors right from the start. In fact, web design stats show that most website visitors decide whether they like your website in less than 50 milliseconds, so visual impact is key.
In addition to outstanding templates, Webnode offers one of the more intuitive ones Page building experiences with other free website builders we’ve used. This makes it easy to customize a template and get your small business website up and running in hours for free, with no prior web design or coding experience.
Another great feature is, like Weebly , you can invite collaborators to help you design , adding content and managing your website to help. It’s also easy to add site-level and page-level SEO settings to ensure your new site can be found online.
Webnode is also the best free drag-and-drop website builder for small businesses likely to need to scale with multilingual sites. While Mozello includes multilingual website features starting with the free version, it only offers around six language options, while Webnode lists around 20.
But if we’re being honest, Webnode’s free version doesn’t. don’t provide enough storage, bandwidth, or critical functionality for many businesses. However, if, like Strikingly, you just need a basic website but want it to look professional and modern, this might be an ideal option.
Webnode Pricing and Features
Best free alternatives to Webnode
One of the main disadvantages of Webnode is the limited disk space and bandwidth (even on paid plans). If you need maximum storage and maximum bandwidth in a free website option, choose GoDaddy. Webnode ads are only removed in the third paid tier, while Mozello branding is removed in the first paid tier ($8 per month). For e-commerce, the best alternatives are Mozello’s and Weebly’s free plans.
Our Expert Opinion
We’re really impressed with the outstanding templates and pre-built pages that you get with Webnode. They make it easy to create a professional-looking website in just a few hours. If your website building process is all about speed and style, choose Webnode.
Try Webnode
Mozello: Most Intuitive Free Website Building Interface
We have found Mozello to have the most intuitive and user-friendly interface of any leading free website builder. This allows for fast, frustration-free website design.It doesn’t have nearly as many templates to choose from as Wix or Webnode, but the templates available cover a variety of industries and design styles.
An intuitive user interface cannot be disregarded when it comes to usability and Website design speed. For example, by clicking “Tools” you can quickly change your cookie notice or add share buttons to your website, both of which could easily be overlooked if you had to find these settings on other website builders.
It’s also easy to find different settings, e.g. B. where you can update your SEO settings and attach your Google Analytics ID for tracking. Changing the look of your website is also easy, although you must do it before spending a lot of time customizing your website or adding content, since you will start over when you choose a new template.
Prices and Features of Mozello
Best Free Mozello Alternatives
Where Mozello lags behind compared to free website builders like Wix and Webnode especially in terms of design , is the lack of ready-made content blocks that are preloaded with images. This makes it harder to imagine what a section will look like once you’ve added it to the site. It also currently offers a lot fewer templates than Wix and Webnode.
Aside from Weebly, Mozello is the only free website builder on this list that includes ecommerce at the free plan level. However, it doesn’t offer nearly the same level of functionality as Weebly in this regard – you can only sell five products with Mozello’s free website builder, but unlimited with Weebly.
Our Expert Opinion
After testing many free website builders, we found Mozello to offer the most intuitive interface. Also, it’s one of the few that offers native ecommerce in a free version. This makes Mozello an affordable and easy-to-use option, even if the number of templates and ready-made content blocks available to you when building a website isn’t enough.
Try Mozello
How we ranked the best free website builders for small business
To be considered for our list of the best free website builders, providers had to offer a forever free plan and make it easy to create a small one Business website, even for beginners. To determine the best of the best, we took into account what you get in free plans, the affordability of entry-level paid plans, ease of use, and our own first-hand testing — and in some cases leveraging the platforms to make our own full viable business websites.
Learn more about each of our evaluation criteria by clicking on the tabs:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best free website builder?
Wix is the best free website builder platform. It’s intuitive and easy to use, and offers plenty of features right out of the box. It also has robust SEO features, which is unusual for a free website builder. Also, third-party apps make it possible to add many features to your free Wix site. The only area where it’s not the best is in e-commerce – use Weebly’s free site builder plan for that.
Is Wix actually free?
Wix offers a completely free website plan for those who want to explore the platform or even create a free business website. However, remember that free plans generally mean hosting on a subdomain (e.g. yoursitename.wix.com) rather than your own domain and displaying ads. This is not optimal for professional use as it affects your company’s credibility and branding. Still, this could be perfectly fine for a personal portfolio or online resume, or your startup side business.
Is there a free website builder that I can use my own domain with?
Yes – With HubSpot CMS, you can create a free business website on your own domain. The section-based editor is easy to use, and you can create up to 25 pages, 20 landing pages, and 100 blog posts on the free plan. Learn how easy it is to create a HubSpot website for free in just six steps.
Conclusion
Our top pick for the best free website builder is Wix. Not only is it user-friendly, but it also offers the greatest design freedom and customizability, including basic SEO and marketing tools small businesses need to create and grow an online brand presence. It’s free forever if you want, so don’t take any chances by trying this website builder today.
Visit Wix
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