You can build a functional business website for $0 using platforms like Wix, Weebly, Square Online, or Google Sites. Each offers a free tier with enough features to get a basic site live within an afternoon. The trade-off: you’ll use a subdomain (yourbusiness.wix.com instead of yourbusiness.com), your site will display the platform’s branding or ads, and you’ll have limited storage. For many small businesses and side projects, that’s a perfectly reasonable starting point.
Pick a Free Website Builder
Several platforms let you build and publish a site without entering a credit card. The best choice depends on what your business actually needs.
- Wix is the most feature-rich free option. You get a drag-and-drop editor, templates designed for dozens of industries, and enough flexibility to build a site that looks polished. The free plan shows Wix ads on your pages and gives you a Wix-branded subdomain, but you can design a multi-page site with contact forms, image galleries, and basic SEO settings.
- Weebly offers a simpler editor with unlimited bandwidth on its free tier, so you won’t hit a traffic cap if your site gets a spike of visitors. It’s a good fit if you want a straightforward site without a steep learning curve.
- Square Online is the strongest free option if you need to sell products or take payments. The free plan covers basic online selling and ties directly into Square’s payment processing, so you can accept credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Cash App Pay without bolting on a separate tool.
- Strikingly lets you create unlimited free websites, which is useful if you run multiple ventures or want to test different landing pages. Sites are single-page by default on the free plan, making it best for simple portfolios or service overviews.
- Google Sites is completely free with a Google account. It’s barebones compared to the others, with no e-commerce features and limited design options, but it integrates naturally with Google Maps, Google Forms, and Google Calendar. If your business just needs a professional-looking informational page, it works.
Set Up Your Site Step by Step
The process is similar across platforms. Most builders walk you through it with prompts, but here’s the general sequence so you know what to expect.
Start by creating an account on your chosen platform. You’ll be asked what type of site you’re building (business, portfolio, online store, blog) and may get template recommendations based on your answer. Pick a template that’s close to what you want. Changing a template’s colors and images is easy; restructuring its layout takes more work.
Next, replace all the placeholder content. Add your business name, a clear description of what you offer, your location or service area, contact information, and real photos. If you don’t have professional photos yet, most builders include a library of free stock images. Write your homepage text so that a visitor immediately understands what your business does and how to reach you or buy from you.
Create the pages your visitors will actually need. For most small businesses, that means a homepage, an about page, a services or products page, and a contact page. Don’t build pages just to fill space. A five-page site with useful content performs better than a fifteen-page site padded with filler.
Before publishing, check your site on a phone screen. Most website builders let you preview the mobile version inside the editor. Over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so if your text is too small, your buttons are hard to tap, or your images stretch off-screen, fix it now.
Add E-Commerce Without Paying
If you need to sell products or accept payments, you don’t necessarily need a paid plan. Square Online’s free tier handles basic online selling with no monthly fee, though Square takes a per-transaction processing fee on each sale. Selldone offers a free plan with unlimited product listings, 1GB of storage, coupon tools, and even email marketing built in, though it charges a 2% transaction fee on the free tier.
Another route is adding a payment button or link to an existing free site. Services like PayPal and Stripe let you generate a payment link or embed a “Buy Now” button on any webpage. This approach works well if you sell a handful of products or services and don’t need a full shopping cart.
For more complex stores, open-source platforms like WooCommerce, OpenCart, and PrestaShop are free to install and highly customizable, with large libraries of free extensions. The catch is that they require you to arrange your own web hosting and handle technical setup, which usually involves some cost and comfort with technology.
What Free Plans Won’t Give You
Free tiers come with real limitations, and it’s worth knowing them upfront so they don’t surprise you later.
The most visible limitation is your web address. Free plans assign you a subdomain like yourbusiness.wix.com or yourbusiness.weebly.com rather than a clean yourbusiness.com domain. This looks less professional on a business card and makes your site harder for customers to remember.
Most free plans also display the platform’s advertising or branding on your pages. You can’t remove it without upgrading. For a personal project that’s no big deal, but for a business trying to build trust with new customers, someone else’s ad banner at the top of your site can undermine credibility.
Storage and bandwidth tend to be tight. Free plans may give you only a few hundred megabytes of storage, which limits how many high-resolution photos or videos you can host. If you run a restaurant, real estate business, or anything else that relies on visual content, you’ll feel this constraint quickly.
How Free Subdomains Affect Search Visibility
Search engines like Google evaluate your site partly based on the domain it lives on. When your site sits on a free subdomain, it shares that domain with thousands of other sites, many of which are low-effort or spammy. Google’s John Mueller has noted that free subdomain hosting makes SEO harder because search engines struggle to separate quality content from the noise around it. If most subdomains on a platform are abandoned or filled with spam, Google’s systems may have difficulty recognizing your site as the exception.
This doesn’t mean you can’t rank at all on a free subdomain, but you’re starting at a disadvantage. For a local service business that relies on Google searches to find new customers, this is a meaningful drawback. For a business that gets customers through word of mouth, social media, or direct links, it matters less.
When to Upgrade (and What It Costs)
A free site is a smart starting point, but most businesses outgrow it within a few months. The natural upgrade triggers are wanting your own domain name, needing to remove platform ads, running out of storage, or wanting to accept payments without third-party workarounds.
Upgrading is cheaper than most people expect. Entry-level paid plans from website builders typically run between $1 and $4 per month when billed annually. At that price you usually get a custom domain (sometimes free for the first year), ad removal, more storage, and basic analytics. Full-featured business plans with e-commerce, email marketing, and priority support generally land in the $10 to $20 per month range.
The good news is that most platforms let you upgrade in place without rebuilding your site. Everything you’ve already designed, written, and configured carries over. So starting free and upgrading later doesn’t waste any of your work. Think of the free tier as a way to learn the platform, build your content, and validate that you actually need a website before committing even a few dollars a month.