Free website for your small business: 7 genuinely free options (and the catch with each)

I build websites for a living, so you'd expect this article to say free websites are rubbish and you should pay me instead. It doesn't. Some free options are genuinely good, one of them is probably the highest-value thing you can do for your business full stop, and if you're starting out with £0, free is often the correct decision.

What I will do is tell you the catch with each one, because every "free website" has a catch, and the companies offering them are not going to spell it out. By the end you'll know exactly which free option fits your situation, and the honest point at which free starts costing you more than it saves.

01Google Business Profile: the best free "website" nobody thinks of

If you do only one thing from this article, do this one. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts your business on Google Search and Google Maps: your phone number, opening hours, photos, reviews, service area, the lot. When someone searches "electrician near me" in your town, the map box at the top of the results is made of these profiles. It costs nothing and it's where most local customers actually look first.

For a lot of local trades, a well-filled profile with a steady stream of reviews brings in more enquiries than their actual website. It's the closest thing to a free lunch in local marketing, and I say that as someone who sells the alternative.

One thing worth knowing: Google used to auto-generate a free one-page website from your profile (those business.site addresses). That was switched off in March 2024, so the profile itself is now the free product, not a website. What you get is a presence, not a page you design.

The catch: it isn't really yours. You can't control the layout, you can't add your own sections, Google can change the rules whenever it likes, and your listing appears in a row alongside your competitors with a helpful "People also search for" underneath. It's also hard to rank well with a profile that links to no website at all, because a website is one of the trust signals Google weighs.

02A Facebook or Instagram page

Also genuinely free, also genuinely useful. A Facebook page gives you somewhere to post job photos, collect recommendations and be found by people searching inside Facebook. For trades that live off word of mouth in local Facebook groups, it earns its keep.

The catch: a Facebook page is a presence on someone else's land. It barely shows up in Google results when someone searches "plasterer in Wallingford", which is where the customers with money in hand are searching. You don't own the page, you don't own the audience, and Meta decides how many of your own followers see each post, which these days is not many unless you pay to boost it. One account lock or algorithm change and your entire online presence is gone overnight.

I've written a full comparison of the two: Facebook page vs a website, which does your business actually need? Short version: have the page, don't make it the foundation.

03Wix and Weebly free plans

The classic "free website builder" answer. Both are real, permanent free tiers, not trials. You get a drag-and-drop editor, templates, and a live site you built yourself in an afternoon. For a school project or a hobby page, honestly fine.

The catch, and it's a double one:

• Adverts on your site. The free tiers show the builder's own branding and ads on your pages. Your customers see another company's promotion sitting on top of your business.
• No custom domain. Your address is something like yourbusiness.wixsite.com/site or yourbusiness.weebly.com. To a customer deciding between two builders, that address quietly says "side project". To Google it says roughly the same thing, and the free plans also hold back most of the SEO controls you'd need to fight it.
• Tight limits. Both cap you around 500MB of storage and minimal bandwidth, which sounds abstract until your photo gallery hits the ceiling.

Everything you'd actually want as a business, your own domain, no ads, analytics, the ability to take payments, sits on the paid plans, which is the entire point of the free tier existing. I've broken down where Wix's paid plans land against a custom-coded site in Wix vs a custom website for UK small businesses.

04Canva's free website builder

The newest entry, and credit where it's due: Canva's free plan lets you publish genuinely pretty one-page sites, currently up to five of them, on a free my.canva.site address. If you already use Canva for your flyers and social posts, the editor will feel instantly familiar, and the results look better than most free Wix efforts.

The catch: pretty is about all it is. These are one-pagers with weak SEO foundations, limited structure, and no custom domain unless you pay for Canva Pro or buy a domain through them. Google wants pages with real depth, proper titles and a site structure it can crawl; a Canva one-pager is a nicely designed poster on the internet. Great for a menu, an event or a link-in-bio page. Not a machine for getting found by strangers.

05Carrd

The one on this list I'd actually call good value. Carrd builds fast, clean one-page sites, and the free plan gives you up to three of them on a .carrd.co address. The sites load quickly, look sharp on mobile, and don't shout "free tier" the way a Wix subdomain does. If you want the DIY route for a simple one-pager, this is the tool I'd point you at.

The catch: the free plan doesn't include a custom domain or contact forms, so a customer can look at your site but not easily contact you through it, which slightly defeats the purpose. Unlocking those needs the Pro Standard plan, around $19 a year (roughly £15) plus the cost of the domain itself. That's superb value, but it means Carrd's usable version isn't free, it's cheap, which is a different thing. And you're still writing your own copy, choosing your own layout and doing your own SEO, which is where most DIY sites quietly fall down.

06Free trials and GoDaddy's free tier

Squarespace gives you 14 days free. Shopify runs cheap trial offers. GoDaddy has an actually-free tier that puts your site on a godaddysites.com address. These get bundled into every "free website" listicle, so let's be straight about them.

The catch: these are paywalls with a lobby. A trial is a countdown, not a website. GoDaddy's free tier is real but strips out essentially everything a business needs: no custom domain, GoDaddy adverts on your pages, and from what I can see no meaningful SEO controls at all, so you can't even edit the page titles Google reads. The moment you need anything, a domain, no ads, a way to take payment, you're on a paid plan starting around a tenner a month. That's not evil, it's just their business model, but calling it a free website is generous.

If you've concluded a paid builder is the sensible middle ground, I've compared the main ones honestly in the best website builders for UK small businesses.

07A coded one-pager a techie mate hosts for you

The unofficial option, and more common than you'd think: your nephew, your mate's son, someone at the cricket club who "does computers" codes you a simple one-page site and sticks it on hosting they already pay for. Done well, this beats every builder on this list. A simple coded page is fast, clean, and can rank if it's structured properly.

The catch: you are now dependent on the mate. When the site needs updating, you're waiting on a favour. When their hosting lapses, your site vanishes. When you fall out, or they move away, or they simply get bored, you own a website you can't access, sometimes on a domain registered in their name, which is the single worst version of this problem. I pick up two or three clients a year whose "mate's site" has been frozen in 2021 because the mate stopped answering messages. If you go this route, insist the domain is registered in your name, whatever else happens. More on why in my guide to domain names for UK businesses.

08The catch that runs through all of them: the domain problem

Notice the pattern. Six of the seven options fail at the same fence: no custom domain. It seems like a cosmetic detail. It isn't. Your own domain, yourbusiness.co.uk, is quietly doing three jobs at once:

• Trust. Customers have absorbed, without ever thinking about it, that real businesses have real addresses. A wixsite.com or .carrd.co address triggers the same instinct as a handwritten sign taped to a van.
• Email. No domain means no james@yourbusiness.co.uk. You're quoting £4,000 jobs from a Gmail or Hotmail address, and some percentage of customers hold that against you whether it's fair or not.
• Ranking. Google treats a page on a shared free subdomain very differently from an established domain of your own. You can pour months of effort into a free-tier site and be building equity in someone else's asset the whole time.

A domain costs roughly £10 to £15 a year. The reason free tiers don't include one isn't the cost, it's that the domain is the thing that makes you leave. Free plans are marketing funnels; they're priced to be outgrown.

09When free is genuinely the right choice

So that this doesn't read as a sales funnel of my own, let me be specific about when I'd tell you to keep your money:

• You're validating an idea. Not sure anyone will pay for your candles, your dog walking, your tuition? A Google Business Profile, a Facebook page and a free Carrd one-pager will find that out for £0. Don't buy a website for a business that doesn't exist yet.
• You genuinely have no money. Been there. A fully filled Google Business Profile with weekly photos and a review-collecting habit will outperform a bad paid website anyway. Start free, upgrade from revenue.
• The internet isn't where your customers are. If 100% of your work comes from one commercial contract or a subcontracting arrangement, a free presence to look legitimate when someone checks up on you may honestly be all you need for now.

The one thing I'd add: even in these cases, buy the domain. £12 a year reserves yourbusiness.co.uk before someone else takes it, and it can just sit there pointing at nothing until you're ready.

10What the paid version actually costs (and where I fit in)

Here's the part where I tell you what I sell, clearly labelled as such.

The reason free tiers convert so well is that people assume the alternative costs thousands. Sometimes it does; agencies routinely quote £2,000 to £5,000 for a small business site, and I've broken down the whole market in what a small business website actually costs in the UK. But the honest floor is much lower than most people think.

At Pixel Heaven it's £100 one-time for a custom-coded site, then £20 a month covering your domain, hosting, maintenance and updates. No contracts, cancel whenever. That £20 a month is the same order of money the "free" builders charge once you add a domain and remove their ads, except the site is coded for speed, built to rank, and the domain is registered in your name from day one.

And because I know "trust me" is worth nothing from a stranger on the internet, the process starts with a free preview: I build your actual homepage, real copy, real layout, before you pay anything. You look at the finished thing and then decide. If it's not right, you've lost nothing and you can go set up that Carrd page with my blessing. My current client work is on the work page and sitting at a 5.0★ average rating across 13 live sites, so you can judge the standard before you even ask.

If you already have some kind of website, free or otherwise, and want to know how it's actually doing, the free website check will tell you honestly, including if the answer is "it's fine, keep it".

Common questions I get

"Can I move from a free website to a proper one later?"

Yes, and it's the normal path. What doesn't move well is momentum: reviews stay with your Google profile (good), but any links or search presence tied to a free subdomain mostly resets when you switch to your own domain. That's the strongest argument for owning your domain from the start, even if everything behind it is free.

"Which single free option should I pick if I can only do one?"

Google Business Profile, and it isn't close. It's the only one on this list that puts you in front of people actively searching for your trade in your town this week.

"Aren't you biased? You sell websites."

Completely. Which is why I've told you the two free options I'd use myself, when to keep your money, and the exact point where the maths flips. If the honest advice were "stay free forever", saying so would still be the right move for me, because you'd remember who told you the truth when the business grows.