Best Free Website Builders in 2026, Compared

If you write code for a living, you already know this request. A cousin opening a bakery, a friend running a yoga class, a neighbor organizing a charity 5K. They all want "a quick free website," and they all assume you'll build it this weekend.

Sometimes you should. Most of the time, a good free website builder is the better answer, because they can run it themselves and you don't become their unpaid web host for the next five years.

The problem is that "free" means very different things depending on the builder. Some free plans plaster ads across your site. Some cap you at two pages. Some are really 14-day trials wearing a free plan costume. So I went through the options that matter in 2026 and wrote down what each one actually gives you, what the catch is, and what it costs to upgrade when "free" stops being enough. This is the list I now send people instead of agreeing to build their site.

Disclosure: I work with the team behind Sitelyx, one of the builders on this list. I've tried to rank it where it honestly fits and to be upfront about its limits, the same way I've treated everything else here.

Quick Picks

If you just want the answer, here it is:

• Best overall: Wix
• Best for blogging: WordPress.com
• Best for design control: Webflow
• Best for no-fuss project, school or event sites: Google Sites
• Best for selling products for free: Square Online
• Cheapest upgrade to a custom domain: Sitelyx
• Best for single-page sites: Carrd
• Best for developers: a static site on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages

Now for the details, starting with the fine print nobody puts on the landing page.

What "Free" Really Means

Free plan vs free trial

A free plan has no end date. You can run a site on it for years without paying. A free trial gives you the full product for a limited time, usually 14 days, and then your site goes offline unless you pay. Squarespace and Hostinger's website builder are both great products, but they offer trials or money-back guarantees rather than permanent free plans, so they aren't on this list.

Everything below has a real, permanent free plan, or is genuinely free to host.

The usual catches

Free plans are a marketing funnel, and the limits are designed to push you toward upgrading. Here's what to look out for:

• Branding or ads on your site. Usually a banner or footer badge, and sometimes actual third-party ads shown to your visitors.
• A subdomain instead of your own domain. Your address looks like yourname.wixsite.com instead of yourname.com.
• Storage and bandwidth caps. Fine for a few pages, tight once you add photo galleries or video.
• Page or post limits. Some free plans cap you at a handful of pages.
• No ecommerce, or fees on every sale. Selling is the most common thing locked behind a paywall.
• Limited SEO controls and analytics. Harder to show up on Google and harder to know who's visiting.
• No custom email. You can't get [e-mail] on a free plan.

None of these are dealbreakers for a hobby site or a quick event page. For a real business, a few of them matter a lot.

How I Compared Them

I looked at each builder through the same lens:

• Free plan limits. Pages, storage, bandwidth and branding.
• Ease of use. Could a non-technical person build and update a site without calling me?
• Design flexibility. How far can you push a template before it fights back?
• Blogging and SEO basics. Editable titles and descriptions, clean URLs and a decent blog editor.
• Ecommerce on the free plan. Can you sell anything without paying?
• Upgrade cost. What it costs to remove the branding and connect your own domain. In my experience, this is the number that actually matters, because almost everyone upgrades eventually.
• Lock-in. Can you export your content if you leave?

One important caveat: free plan limits and prices change often. Every figure here was checked at the time of writing, but confirm the current details on each builder's own pricing page before you commit.

The Best Free Website Builders in 2026

1. Wix: Best overall

Best for: small businesses, creatives and anyone who wants maximum design freedom without touching code.

What the free plan includes: the full drag-and-drop editor, hundreds of templates, hosting and 500 MB of storage. There's no time limit.

The catch: a Wix banner sits on your site, your address is a wixsite.com subdomain, and you can't sell anything. The editor's freedom also cuts both ways. It's easy for non-designers to create a cluttered page.

Cheapest upgrade: the Light plan runs about $17 a month billed annually and adds a custom domain without the Wix banner, but it still doesn't let you sell. To take payments, you need Core, at about $29 a month billed annually.

Verdict: the safest all-round recommendation for non-technical friends. Just be clear with them that the free plan is a starting point, not a business site.

2. WordPress.com: Best for blogging

Best for: writers, bloggers and anyone whose site is mostly articles.

What the free plan includes: WordPress's excellent block editor, free themes, hosting and 1 GB of storage.

The catch: WordPress.com shows ads to your visitors on the free plan, you're on a wordpress.com subdomain, and you can't install plugins. Also, a quick note on naming: WordPress.com is a hosted service, while WordPress.org is the free open-source software you install on your own hosting. They share a name, but the free WordPress.com plan is far more limited than self-hosted WordPress.

Cheapest upgrade: the Personal plan is about $4 a month billed annually ($48 for the year) or $9 billed monthly, and removes ads and adds a custom domain. Annual billing also includes a free domain for the first year.

Verdict: the best free home for a blog, and the upgrade path is one of the cheapest on this list.

3. Webflow: Best for design control

Best for: designers and developers who want a visual builder that thinks in real HTML and CSS, with classes, flexbox, grid and a proper CMS.

What the free plan includes: the full designer, two static pages, a CMS with up to 50 items, 1 GB of bandwidth and a webflow.io subdomain.

The catch: the Webflow badge appears on free sites, two pages is very tight, and there's no custom domain. The learning curve is also much steeper than Wix. Hand Webflow to a non-technical client and they'll call you within the week.

Cheapest upgrade: the Basic site plan, at roughly $14 to $15 a month, gets you a custom domain for a simple site without a CMS.

Verdict: the best free option for learning and prototyping, and a great tool if you want visual building without giving up structure. Not the one to give your cousin's bakery.

4. Google Sites: Best for no-fuss project sites

Best for: school projects, internal team pages, event sites, wedding pages and documentation for small groups.

What the free plan includes: everything. Google Sites is completely free with any Google account, shows no ads and integrates neatly with Docs, Sheets, Slides and Calendar.

The catch: design options are basic, there's no real blog, and SEO controls are minimal. It's built for sharing information, not for winning customers.

Cheapest upgrade: there isn't one, because it's already free. You can even connect a custom domain from a personal Google account. Verify the domain in Google Search Console, add a CNAME record pointing to ghs.googlehosted.com, then assign it in the site's settings. It has to be a subdomain, like www.yourdomain.com, rather than the bare root domain.

Verdict: the most genuinely free option on the list. Perfect when the goal is "get this information online today," and wrong for anything that needs to sell.

5. Square Online: Best for selling for free

Best for: small shops, makers and restaurants that want to take orders without paying a monthly fee.

What the free plan includes: an ecommerce site with product listings, online ordering for food businesses and a booking site for appointment-based businesses, all on a Square-hosted subdomain.

The catch: you pay on every sale instead of every month. On the free plan, online transactions cost 3.3% plus 30 cents. Square branding appears on free sites, and design options are more limited than a general-purpose builder.

Cheapest upgrade: Square restructured its plans in 2025. Its all-in-one Plus plan is about $49 a month and lowers the online rate to 2.9% plus 30 cents.

Verdict: if a friend wants to sell something next week and has no budget, this is the answer. The per-sale fee is easy to live with at low volume.

6. Sitelyx: Cheapest upgrade to a custom domain

Best for: small businesses, freelancers and side projects that need a few proper pages and a blog, and want a custom domain without a big monthly bill.

What the free plan includes: one website with a yourname.sitelyx.co subdomain, all 18 niche templates, up to 5 pages and 5 blog posts, SSL, a contact form, basic analytics, plus blog, portfolio, donation and event modules. There's no time limit, and you don't need a credit card to start.

[EDITOR: confirm whether free Sitelyx sites show a Sitelyx badge or ads, and add one sentence here before publishing.]

The catch: the free plan caps you at 5 pages and 5 posts, and it doesn't include ecommerce. Sitelyx is also a newer builder, so its template library and community are much smaller than Wix or WordPress, and you'll find fewer tutorials and third-party integrations.

Cheapest upgrade: this is where it stands out. The Growth plan is $4 a month and adds a custom domain, up to 20 pages, and booking modules for appointments, restaurants and events, along with Stripe and PayPal payment gateways. The Pro plan, at $6 a month, adds ecommerce and point of sale with no Sitelyx commission on sales. Payment processor fees still apply. Paid plans come with a 10-day free trial, and you can see the full breakdown of Sitelyx's free and paid plans on its pricing page.

Verdict: if the budget question is "what's the cheapest way to get a real business site on my own domain," Sitelyx is hard to beat. You can browse the 18 Sitelyx templates to see whether one fits your niche before you sign up. If you need a huge app marketplace or advanced design freedom, Wix or Webflow are the better fit.

7. Carrd: Best for single-page sites

Best for: personal pages, link-in-bio pages, portfolios, landing pages and "coming soon" pages.

What the free plan includes: up to three published single-page sites on a Carrd subdomain, with a clean editor that's genuinely hard to make look bad.

The catch: every site is one page, a "Made with Carrd" footer appears on free sites, and there's no custom domain.

Cheapest upgrade: this is the cheapest upgrade on the list. Pro Standard costs $19 a year and adds custom domains for up to 10 sites. (Pro Lite, at $9 a year, doesn't include custom domains.)

Verdict: if one page is all you need, Carrd is the best tool for the job. Developers love it for side projects, and so do I.

8. Strikingly: Good for simple one-page stores

Best for: single-page sites that need a little selling, like a product launch or a small personal brand.

What the free plan includes: one scrolling page, 500 MB of storage, 5 GB of bandwidth and a Strikingly subdomain.

The catch: Strikingly branding appears on free sites, and selling is limited to a single product. The one-page format suits landing pages but gets awkward for businesses with lots of services.

Cheapest upgrade: paid plans add a custom domain, more pages and more products. Prices vary by billing term, so check the current plans before you choose.

Verdict: a decent middle ground between Carrd and a full builder, especially if you want to sell one thing on one page.

9. SITE123: Easiest for complete beginners

Best for: people who've never built a website and want the most hand-holding possible.

What the free plan includes: a guided setup that asks a few questions and builds a site for you, with hosting on a site123.me subdomain.

The catch: the free plan is tight, with 250 MB of storage and 250 MB of bandwidth. A SITE123 banner appears on free sites, and the structured approach means less design freedom than Wix.

Cheapest upgrade: the Premium plan adds a custom domain and removes the banner. The price depends on billing length, so compare terms before paying.

Verdict: a solid choice for the least technical person you know. Anyone with a little confidence will outgrow it quickly.

The Developer Route: Truly Free Hosting

If you're comfortable with Git and a terminal, there's an option that beats every free plan above on the things that matter: no ads, your own domain, HTTPS and great performance, all for $0.

Static site generators

A static site generator turns Markdown files and templates into plain HTML at build time. There's no database to secure and no server-side code to patch, and the output loads fast. Astro, Hugo and Eleventy are all excellent choices. Astro is especially friendly if you already know modern JavaScript, and Astro's documentation has starter templates for blogs, portfolios and docs sites.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages serves a static site straight from a repository, for free. You can connect a custom domain and enforce HTTPS, and every push updates the site. It only hosts static content, so anything dynamic like forms or comments needs a third-party service. The GitHub Pages docs walk you through setup in a few minutes.

Cloudflare Pages and Netlify

Both offer generous free tiers that build your site automatically on every push. You also get preview deployments for every branch, a global CDN and custom domains with HTTPS. Cloudflare Pages is particularly strong on bandwidth limits and speed, while Netlify's free tier includes a simple form-handling service that's handy for contact forms.

The honest catch: this route is free for you, but not for the person you're building it for. There's no visual editor, so every content change means a commit. For your own portfolio or blog, it's the best free option there is. For your cousin's bakery, it means you're on call forever.

What About AI Website Builders?

In 2026, almost every builder on this list has added some kind of AI feature. Typically, you describe your business in a sentence or two, and the builder generates a layout, picks colors, writes placeholder copy and suggests images. Some standalone tools now build an entire site from a single prompt.

These features are genuinely useful for getting past a blank page. A rough first draft in two minutes beats an hour of staring at templates. But I'd treat them as a starting point, not a finished site, for three reasons:

• The copy is generic. AI-written text tends to sound like every other small business website. Your real story, real photos and real customer details are what make visitors trust you.
• The facts need checking. AI tools sometimes invent services, opening hours or claims you don't actually offer. Read every line before you publish.
• The free tiers are limited. Many builders cap AI generations on free plans or keep the best AI features for paid tiers.

My advice is to let the AI build the skeleton, then rewrite the words yourself. It takes an extra hour and makes the site sound like a real person runs it, which is exactly what visitors are looking for.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Builder	Free storage	Branding or ads on free plan	Custom domain on free plan	Sell on free plan	Cheapest upgrade with a custom domain
Wix	500 MB	Yes	No	No	About $17/month (annual)
WordPress.com	1 GB	Yes (ads)	No	No	About $4/month (annual)
Webflow	1 GB bandwidth, 2 pages	Yes	No	No	About $14 to $15/month
Google Sites	Google account storage	No	Yes	No	Free
Square Online	Not capped	Yes	No	Yes (3.3% + 30¢ per sale)	About $49/month (Plus)
Sitelyx	5 pages, 5 posts	Confirm before publishing	No	No	$4/month
Carrd	3 one-page sites	Yes	No	No	$19/year
Strikingly	500 MB, 1 page	Yes	No	1 product	Varies by term
SITE123	250 MB	Yes	No	No	Varies by term
GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages	Static sites	No	Yes	No	Free

How to Pick the Right Free Builder

Match the tool to the job:

• "I need this online today for an event or a project." Use Google Sites.
• "I want to start a blog." Use WordPress.com.
• "I want a good-looking business site that can grow." Use Wix, or Sitelyx if keeping the monthly cost low matters most.
• "I want to sell products without a monthly fee." Use Square Online.
• "I just need one page." Use Carrd.
• "I want full creative control and I'm willing to learn." Use Webflow.
• "I'm comfortable with Git." Build a static site and host it on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you're helping someone else, add one more question: who will update the site after launch? If the answer is them, pick something with a visual editor they'll actually enjoy using.

When You Should Upgrade

Free plans are great for testing an idea, building a portfolio or getting a hobby project online. But there are a few clear signs it's time to pay:

• You're using the site for a real business. A custom domain and the absence of someone else's branding make an immediate difference to trust.
• You need to take payments, and per-sale fees on a free plan are starting to add up.
• You've hit the page, post or storage limits.
• You want a professional email address on your own domain.

My rule of thumb is simple: the cheapest plan that adds a custom domain is usually the only upgrade a small site needs. Everything above that is optional until you have a specific reason.

Watch Out for Lock-In

Here's the part most comparison articles skip. With a hosted builder, you're renting, not owning. Your content lives on the builder's platform, in the builder's format, and moving it somewhere else later is rarely a one-click job.

Before you commit, a few quick checks save a lot of pain later:

• Can you export your content? WordPress.com lets you export posts and pages in a standard format. Many drag-and-drop builders only let you copy content out by hand.
• Who owns the domain? Register your domain with an independent registrar, or make sure you can transfer it out if the builder gives you one. Your domain is the one thing you should never lose.
• Where do your images live? Keep the original photos on your own computer or cloud drive, not only inside the builder.

None of this means you should avoid hosted builders. It just means you should go in with your eyes open, and own the pieces that are hardest to replace.

Can a Free Website Rank on Google?

Yes. Google indexes free sites, and they can rank. But free plans make it harder in a few ways. Subdomains build authority for the builder rather than for you, SEO controls are often limited, and the extra branding scripts can slow pages down.

Whichever builder you pick, check the basics once your site is live: page titles, meta descriptions, mobile layout and loading speed. A free SEO audit will flag those issues in about a minute, which beats guessing why the site isn't showing up.

Launch a Free Site or Blog in 30 Minutes

If you're wondering how to start a blog for free, or just want any simple site live tonight, here's the fastest path:

1. Pick a builder from the decision guide above.
2. Choose a template that's close to what you want. Resist the urge to customize everything on day one.
3. Write three pages: a homepage that says what you do, an about page and a contact page.
4. Publish your first blog post, even if it's short. A site with real content looks alive.
5. Check it on your phone, connect basic analytics and share the link.

You can polish the design later. Getting something real online is the step most people never take.

FAQs

Is there a truly free website builder?

Yes. Google Sites is completely free with no ads, and static hosting on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages costs nothing either. Most other builders offer permanent free plans with limits, such as branding on your site, a subdomain instead of your own domain, and restrictions on pages, storage or selling.

What's the difference between a free plan and a free trial?

A free plan has no end date, so you can keep your site online without paying, within its limits. A free trial gives you the full product for a limited time, usually around 14 days, and your site goes offline when it ends unless you choose a paid plan.

Can I use my own domain with a free website builder?

Usually not. Most free plans only give you a subdomain, like yourname.wixsite.com. The main exceptions are Google Sites, which supports custom domains for free, and static hosting on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. Elsewhere, a custom domain is usually the first thing you get when you upgrade.

Do free website builders include hosting?

Yes. Hosted builders like Wix, WordPress.com, Webflow, Google Sites, Square Online, Sitelyx, Carrd, Strikingly and SITE123 include hosting on their free plans, so you don't need to buy it separately. Self-hosted WordPress is different, because you install the software on hosting you pay for yourself.

Will my free website show up on Google?

It can. Google indexes free sites, and a free site with useful content can rank for specific searches. A subdomain, limited SEO controls and slower pages make it harder to compete, though. Write clear page titles, keep the site fast and mobile-friendly, and submit it to Google Search Console.

Which free website builder is best for beginners?

Wix and SITE123 are the most beginner-friendly. SITE123 builds a site for you from a few questions, while Wix gives you more freedom with a drag-and-drop editor. For a single-page site, Carrd is very easy, and Google Sites is the simplest of all for basic information pages.

How do I remove ads from a free website?

On most builders, you remove ads or branding by upgrading to the cheapest paid plan. Prices range from about $19 a year on Carrd to about $4 a month on WordPress.com and Sitelyx, and more on Wix. Google Sites and static hosting on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages never show ads.

Wrapping Up

Free is a great place to start and a bad place to stay if you're running a business. Pick the builder that matches the job, know what the upgrade costs before you commit, and don't be afraid to start small. If you're the developer in the family, point people to the decision guide above, and save the static site setup for your own portfolio.