The Best FREE Website Builders In 2021... And The Worst

so here's the truth most companies don't want to give you something for free it's crazy right there are definitely free website builders but they often put limitations on free websites that might annoy you and maybe are designed to get you to sign up to a paid plan the most common of these limitations is an ad most website builders have an ad somewhere on free websites these ads range from pretty bad to actually pretty tolerable this video will be a rapid tour of the top free website builders i'll tell you which ones are great and which ones probably aren't worth your time my work is supported by affiliate commissions so if you'd like to try one of these website builders you can find a link to them in the video description below and i might earn a commission so let's start with square online i think it's the best free website builder and the biggest reason for this is they don't limit features for example square includes tons of ecommerce features on free plants unlimited products appointment scheduling curbside pickup apple pay digital products instagram shops gift cards shipping calculators and a bunch more plus the credit card processing fee on free plans is the same fee you have on most paid plans and they also provide customer support for free users including phone support which is kind of crazy no other free website builder does that now overall the square website editor is simple and easy to use but not super customizable for example you build pages by adding sections now within that section you can toggle individual elements on or off but you can't actually add any new elements if you want more elements you need to find a different section now square does include an add-on free websites but as you'll see later in the video square's ad is not nearly as bad as some of the other free website builders it's a small ad in the footer of your website so that's square online my top choice for the best free website builder the next three website builders i'll cover are also great but they each have unique reasons for using them first webflow webflow is what i'd recommend if you'd like to design your own theme from scratch this is the editor and this is a design i mocked up myself it's not a template the key thing to understand is that webflow gives you the flexibility of front-end code without actually requiring you to know how to code so we can adjust the padding on this heading tag or we can change the border radius on this button now web developers will recognize padding in border radius these are both css properties webflow takes these code concepts and organizes them into an interface the other great thing is that webflow includes a cms in the free plan so in my cms i created a collection of articles each of these articles automatically gets their own page that's pretty awesome i will say webflow has a learning curve so understanding the fundamentals of web design will really help a lot here now finding webflow's free plan is not super obvious on the pricing page scroll down to account plans and find the free starter plan then you're going to want to use the staging server i asked webflow to confirm that this was a free plan and yeah you can choose this and they will host your website for free indefinitely now if you do sign up for this plan just know that webflow includes a small ad that scrolls alongside your website card is the best website builder for one page websites partly because they only focus on one page websites so i often see personal websites and landing pages built with card here we are in cards editor this is just a quick personal website i mocked up in card and if we move to the live version of this website we'll see that if you scroll to the footer you can find the ad that card puts on free websites and it's really really small next up google sites google sites is 100 free they don't even offer pay plans i think there are two good reasons to use google sites one unlike square webflow and card google sites actually lets you add a custom domain name so like yourwebsite.com now adding a custom domain name is not super easy you will definitely need to learn about dns adding a custom domain name is actually way easier with other website builders but that's only if you're on their paid plans the second reason to use google sites is that they include a very small ad and honestly ads probably not even the right word here it's more of a scrolling icon that the visitor has to hover for more information now there are some downsides to google sites first of all if you don't add a custom domain name you'll be given a free subdomain but as you can see here it's awfully long there's also only one google site's theme and it's pretty lame [Music] plus there aren't many customization options you can't for example change the font and you can actually change the layout text just spans the whole page it can't be organized into columns overall google sites probably isn't really for a small business i'm not saying it can't be done but it just might not be a perfect fit instead i've actually noticed a lot of academics using google sites okay things are going to speed up from here i'm going to quickly share two honorable mentions these are free website builders that are just sort of um just okay you craft like google sites ucraft lets you connect a domain name on their free plan that's huge but there are things i just don't love for starters people have complained to me that ucraft funnels them to a paid trial when they are trying to sign up for a free plan i don't exactly know what's going on here but i've tried it myself and it's true sometimes i'm able to get a free plan and sometimes not it's confusing also ucraft includes a big ad that scrolls along free websites it's just too intrusive web node webnode is a basic website builder with pretty great templates and there's just a small ad on free websites unfortunately web node limits free sites to one gigabyte of bandwidth if you don't know basically when visitors visit one of your pages they consume your bandwidth and one gigabyte of bandwidth doesn't get you very far now i'm going to move even quicker through the free website builders i do not recommend wix wix includes a big ad that scrolls on top of free websites and the sub domain they give free websites it's too long it's basically username.wixsite.com your website name finally wix has a 500 megabyte bandwidth limit which is even lower than webnode go daddy godaddy has a large ad that scrolls along for you websites and that's enough for me not to recommend them strikingly it's kind of the same thing really um this ad is just too intrusive wordpress.com you guessed it i ch i just think this ad is too intrusive so there you go uh i hope this was helpful like i said earlier in the video my work is supported by affiliate commissions so if you'd like to try one of these website builders you can find a link to them in the video description below and i might earn a commission i update this video once a year but website builders tend to experiment with their free plans and things can change fast so let me know in the comments if you spot anything out of date at any rate thanks for watching

Channel: Site Builder Report

Views: 43,317

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Id: myM1H_jAyzI

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021