A Free Website: too good to be true?
As a business that’s just taking off, you may not have the budget yet to have your entire website designed and built from scratch. And that’s completely normal. A lot of starting businesses choose to opt for a cheap or even free alternative. With some website builders you can create a fully functioning and sleek website without paying a single coin.
Hi, I am Margot
Web designer, digital nomad & cheese enthusiast.
As a business that’s just taking off, you may not have the budget yet to have your entire website designed and built from scratch. And that’s completely normal. A lot of starting businesses choose to opt for a cheap or even free alternative. With some website builders you can create a fully functioning and sleek website without paying a single coin.
Too good to be true? YESSS!
More than often, these tools aren’t actually free of charge. You can create a free website, but only with a very basic version of the platform with limited options regarding flexibility and customization. Do you want this flexibility and professionalism? Pay up! (and not a little)
The cons of a “free” website
As mentioned above, these seemingly free website builders aren’t free at all. And that’s not the only drawback you might face when choosing a platform like that. Let’s have a look at some of the bad stuff these free web builders bring along:
Some of these disadvantages are: – You don’t get your own domain name, but a subdomain (something like “domainname.subdomain.com”) on someone else’s website.
✽ Third-party adsmight be placed on your website, which you get no profit from whatsoever.
✽ You will probably not receive customer supportin case you face issues on your site.
✽ You don’t get that much disk space, which means that you can only upload a few large images to your library and that’s it.
✽ Your website will be slower than an average website – a website with a fast loading time will cost you money.
✽ You will not get your owne-mail address. And e-mailing with a Hotmail or Gmail address looks a lot less professional.
✽ There’s a limited choice in design customization. Usually, you can choose from a handful of free basic designs, but more than half of the options are often off-limits until you pay.
✽ You cannot use external free software for newsletters, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and backups, for example. You have to pay extra for a lot of these tools.
✽ You get no or very limited SEO options. Which will make it much more difficult to rank high with a free website.
✽ You get access to very limited or no website statistics at all.
Phew, that’s quite the list if you’d ask me. Do you want all (or some) of these from this list though? You guessed it … Pay uppp! Thus, it is a typical business model that these types of platforms use to make a profit. And unfortunately, a lot of users seem to fall for it.