Due to the current circumstances it seems that everyone needs a website nowadays and many choose to go for free options. However, many people seem to fail to realise that the options they choose are not really free. In this short article I shall explain how to start a truly free website.

There are many companies out there that promise you can start off with a free website, amongst the likes of wix.com, wordpress.com, weebly.com, webs.com etc. However, at a closer look you will notice that they are not really free as they either have limitations, display ads, or charge you extra to add your own domain.

The Free Hosting Promise

Most mainstream website services will offer to host your website for free. That means that you won’t have to pay for your space on the web. However, at a closer look you will notice that all these services come at a price: ads that can be placed in various locations of your site. One example would be Wix’s massive banner with ‘This site was created by Wix” text just above the header on your site. WordPress.com, Weebly.com, Webs.com and other similar services have the same practice.

In order to remove these adds you will have to get on a premium plan which will incur additional monthly costs.

The Free Website Builder Promise

The website builder is probably the only promise that is almost accurate. Yes, most of these services won’t charge you a dime to use their website builders. You will be able to use their powerful drag and drop builders as well but you will be severely restricted in terms to changing the actual code to the sites.

So, if you are looking for advanced functionalities you will be most likely forced to upgrade or pay for additional functionalities. All in all , the free website builder is not as free as you can’t really design your website the way you really want – you have to abide by the builder’s limitations or pay for extra features.

The Free Domain Promise

Most mainstream services out there offer you a free sub-domain on their website. So Wordress.com offer yoursite.wordpress.com subdomains, Weebly.com yoursite.weebly.com, Wix yoursite.wixsite.com and so on. However, in order to add your own domain, you usually have to get on a premium plan with them.

While they might have an offer to get your domain for very cheap or free for the first year, you will be paying 6 or 7 times the value of your yearly domain cost every month just for the domain connection.

WordPress.com seems to be a bit of an exception as it does offer a cheaper plan (£3/month) for the ability to solely adding the domain. However, it still lacks more advanced features such as PayPal integrations, Google Ads or SEO tools, which you will be forced to pay for when your needs grow.

How to start a truly Free Website

While most website services providers offer all inclusive packages (hosting, builder, domain) there are other services that don’t, or give you an option to get them separately. So for example you can choose your hosting company, a different website builder and a different domain provider.

In this way you can pick and choose the best elements to make up your site and you will also get to learn along the way, as you’ll have to do a bit of extra work to connect everything together: your host, your website builder and your domain.

How to get truly free Web Hosting

There are many services out there that don’t charge a penny for hosting your website, offer unlimited bandwidth and are completely ad-free.

A simple google search can bring about a big list of such services. In this article, however I shall only be recommending one such service that I’ve personally used. InfinityFree offers unlimited bandwidth, ads-free hosting at no costs whatsoever. All you have to do is sign up. In case you need a tutorial on how to get started with it I’ve also written an article about it here.

How to get a truly free Web Builder

The most popular and open source (free) website builder is WordPress. Originally a blogging platform, WordPress has grown to power up 39% of all websites on the world wide web. And here we need to make the distinction between WordPress.com, which is an all inclusive platform and WordPress.org, which is the free website builder. In our case, of course, we refer to WordPress.org.

Whilst there are other free options out there such as Joomla, Drupal, Nicepage etc, WordPress is one of the most user-friendly, customisable and supported (via public forums and youtube tutorials) content management system. WordPress also makes it easy to start very basic and upgrade when you are ready.

Once you got your free hosting, all you have to do is install WordPress in your host’s Control Panel and you’re good to go. For a walkthrough on how to install WordPress on your host CPanel click here.

How to get a truly free Domain for your website

Once you have your free web-host and builder in place you can start thinking about your domain name. InfinityFree offers a free subdomain but it does not really look that good as it’s quite long and usually contains your user id (e.g : xet231243.epzy.com)

Whilst this a viable option, I would recommend getting a free, personalisable custom domain and not a subdomain. If you are a student, you are in luck, because NameCheap are offering free domain names to students! All you have to do is register with your university e-mail address and you’ll get your domain of choice at absolutely no fee.

If you are not a student and still cant afford the price of a yearly domain (£10-£15 yearly with first year free usually but in some cases you might need to get them for at least 2 years) then there is an alternative. Little known extensions emerging on the web come at no cost at all for the first year and no . For example dot.tk offer free .tk , .ga , .ml , and .gq for free for the first year, with no obligation to pay further costs when the free year expires. If you want to take advantage of the full service, you could simply get one of these extensions every year (meaning you’d have 4 years worth of free domains) but that means your website address will change every year.

Once you get your free domain name all you have to do is connect it to your website via your DNS settings. If you need a tutorial on this I’ve covered it in this article.

Conclusion

Starting a website at absolutely no cost is very possible and easy. You just need to take a bit of time to understand how a website works and then pick and mix the elements that best suit your needs. Now that you know how to start a truly free website, please also bear in mind that free options sometimes have downsides too. For example they can be more susceptible to hacking so you might want to be careful if your website will hold any sensitive information.